Chapter 8: Six Months of Silence

At six in the morning Eleanor was still on the road, and I walked out to her.

I wore Byron's barn coat over my nightgown and gravel crunched under his boots.

I left Poppy asleep in the house with him in the doorway, watching.

Eleanor lowered her window an inch when I reached the sedan.

"Lacey. You'll catch a chill."

"You called the sheriff on a four-day-old baby," I said.

"I called out of love."

"Then you can love her from the road. She isn't going anywhere with you."

Eleanor looked at me through the gap in the glass.

She wasn't angry.

That was the worst of it.

"Ask my son what he kept from you," she said. "Ask Byron about March."

"What about March?"

"He'll tell you. Or he won't, and then you'll know what sort of man you're sleeping under."

"I'm not sleeping with him."

"Then you're the first woman in that house who isn't," said Eleanor, and she raised the window and drove away.

I stood on the gravel until her taillights turned the corner.

Then I walked back up the drive.

Byron was standing at the foot of the porch steps.

He had heard.

His face was calm, and he waited.

"What's March?" I asked.

"Let's go inside."

"No. Here."

He took a breath.

"In March, I drove to a steakhouse in Delaware to see a supplier," he said. "I saw Brady at a corner table with Daphne."

"With Daphne."

"They were holding hands. She had her head on his shoulder."

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