Chapter 14: Both of Us

"How long have you been there?" I said.

"Since 'hush now.'"

So, the whole thing.

He didn't come into the room. He stayed in the doorway.

"You never sang in this house," he said.

"You were never in this house."

He took that without flinching.

"What is it?"

"The lullaby," I said. "From the studio. From your envelope."

He looked at the piano for a long moment.

"I've looked at those pictures a thousand times," he said. "I never once wondered what you were singing."

I closed the lid over the keys.

"Goodnight, Jameson."

"Goodnight."

He stepped back to let me pass.

In the hall, in the dark, I felt him watch me all the way to the side door.

In the morning Ollie found me at the carriage house table with a yellow legal pad.

I'd written a heading at the top.

FELICITY DUNAGAN. SONGS.

He read it over my shoulder while he drank his coffee.

"Is that a band name?"

"It's an account."

He put his mug down.

"Fee."

"Lisette has my face, my son and two point four million people," I said. "She doesn't have my name. My name's on my driver's license."

"She doesn't have your voice either," Ollie said slowly.

"She never wanted it."

He looked at me for a second.

Then he went out to his truck and came back with a black case the size of a suitcase.

"You keep a microphone in your truck?"

"I keep two microphones in my truck. I'm not an animal."

We set up in the front room of the main house at ten.

Jameson had left for the hospital at six, but there was a note on the piano lid in his narrow surgeon's handwriting.

Tuned in March. It should hold.

Ollie hung a quilt over the bare window to kill the echo.

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