Chapter 23: Two Bare Hands

We were married on a Saturday in April, on the forty-seventh floor of Delamere Tower.

The glass reception area had changed.

Quincy's assistant had filled it with rows of white chairs, and the big windows were open to the lake.

There were plants now. Someone had put a vase of tulips on the glass desk.

Sixty people sat in the chairs, and every one of them had been asked, not told.

The board chair sat in the front row in a hat. The nurse from forty-six sat beside her, crying already.

The detective in the brown suit had come in a dress, and she kept her phone face down on her knee.

The executor sat at the back with a butterscotch in his cheek.

My divorce had come through in February.

Colin had pleaded guilty in January, to a charge I had not known existed, and the judge had given him nine years.

Roberta's trial was set for the fall. Her lawyer had stopped returning the prosecutor's calls.

Lacey had taken a plea and a cooperation deal. I read the letter she sent me from the county jail once, and I put it in a drawer.

I had not forgiven her. I did not owe her that, and she hadn't asked.

I stood outside the double glass doors in a plain ivory dress with a bouquet of white ranunculus in my fists.

On the wall beside the doors hung the folded cloth.

It was still there. For four years, everyone who came to the forty-seventh floor had used it to open the handle.

I took it off its hook.

"Are you ready?" said the nurse's daughter, who had volunteered to be my attendant and was nine years old.

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