Day Seven I Signed It novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: Margo's Ten Minutes
Ivy handed me the package at my door at six on Monday evening, with both hands, carefully.
"It came while you were out," she said. "I read the card. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have."
"It's all right."
"It says to look behind the photograph."
I took it.
It was heavy and flat, and I knew the shape of it before I tore the paper.
My father's photograph looked up at me from its black frame.
He was fifty in it, squinting at a lake, with his hand up against the sun.
I turned it over.
The backing was held with four small metal tabs.
I had one tab bent open when somebody knocked, hard, on the wall beside my open door.
"Colin."
Margo stood on the landing in the white jeans she'd worn that morning.
She had been crying for hours, and she'd stopped trying to hide it.
"I need ten minutes," she said. "Please. Whatever you think of me. Ten."
I set the frame on the counter, face down.
Across the hall, Ivy's door closed gently, with a click that said she would be listening to nothing at all.
"You can come in," I said.
Margo sat on the edge of the sublet's one armchair.
She looked at the bare walls and the borrowed lamp.
"This is where you've been living," she said.
"It has a ficus."
She tried to laugh, and it broke.
"I signed," Margo said. "I signed because I thought you were bluffing, and every one of them was watching, and I couldn't be the one to blink. I've been sick all day."
"I know."
"I don't want it. I never wanted it."
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