Silence Was Not Forgiveness novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: Wednesday Supper
Lena's mother cooks supper for the whole family every Wednesday, and in nine years of marriage I have missed it twice.
I was not going to miss it this week.
The Hartwig house is a narrow brick colonial on the north side.
An old hardware-store sign leans in the garage.
Lena's father has run Hartwig Hardware for forty years and never thrown anything out.
Lena walked in ahead of me with a bakery pie and kissed her mother on both cheeks.
"You look wonderful," her mother said. "Doesn't she look wonderful?"
"She does," her father said from his armchair.
He didn't get up, which meant he was watching the game and meant it as a compliment.
Hannah came in last, still in navy scrubs from a double shift, and dropped into the chair beside me without a word.
She is Lena's younger sister, an ER nurse with a blue streak in her hair.
She has never been shy about what she thinks of me.
That night she said nothing at all, which was worse.
Lena was radiant.
She passed the potatoes to me first.
She laughed at her father's joke about a customer who tried to return a snow shovel in July.
She put her hand on my forearm while her mother told the story of our wedding.
She left it there until the pot roast came around.
Rule five said I could not touch her.
Nothing in the rules said she could not touch me, and every time she did, I felt Hannah watching.
"Joan called me yesterday," Lena's mother said, ladling gravy. "She's inviting us to her birthday dinner on the fifteenth. She said there's good news."
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