Chapter 11: Woman to Woman

Sabrina knocked twice, politely.

Jerome opened the door a hand's width. "No."

"I'm alone," she said. "I drove myself. I'd like five minutes with Hallie, and you can stand in the next room and listen to every word."

He looked at me over his shoulder.

I was in his flannel shirt and a pair of jeans from Joan's bag, with my hair tied up and the night still on my skin.

"Let her in," I said.

Sabrina came in out of the snow in a long camel coat, a cream scarf and no makeup.

She looked the way she had looked the morning of my wedding, when she had zipped up my dress and cried a little.

"Thank you," she said.

Jerome went up two steps of the loft stair and sat down on the third, in plain sight, with his arms folded.

I took my phone off the workbench, pressed record, and set it down again face up between us.

Sabrina looked at the red dot on the screen.

"Of course you are," Sabrina said, and smiled.

"Sit down."

She sat on the stool by the stove, where Jerome had bandaged my hand, and put her gloves on her knee.

"I owe you an apology," she said. "I let things go too far. Dirk told me you were finished with him. I should have known better."

"That isn't why you're here."

"No."

She unwound her scarf, slid one sleeve of her coat back, and held out her arm.

Across the soft inside of her forearm lay four dark bruises in a row, and a fifth on the other side.

They were the same marks I had on my wrist.

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