Chapter 10: Chet's List

Chet's POV

I said the cruelest thing I could think of to June on that terrace, and I said it because my father was standing behind the glass.

He had told me to, with a hand on my neck.

"Good work, son," he'd said. "Now don't get fond. Fond makes you sloppy, and sloppy gets people hurt."

He had said the same thing to me at nine years old, in a hallway with a landlord's men at the door.

That was the night I tore my ribs open on a fence, climbing out of a back window.

I got in my car and drove to the end of the Engstrom road and stopped under the trees.

My hands were shaking on the wheel.

I thought about her face when I said it.

She hadn't cried.

She had gone very straight and still, and I knew that look because I had seen it on my mother.

I turned the car around.

My father kept one suitcase locked in the guest wing, and he thought I didn't know the code.

It was my mother's birthday.

He had never changed it, and I had never decided what that meant.

The wing was empty.

I could hear Helen laughing somewhere below with the lawyer, and the housekeeper's vacuum in the east hall.

I knelt and turned the dial, and it opened.

Under three folded shirts there was a black notebook with a cracked spine.

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