The Colonel's Daughter Is Gone novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At his promotion dinner Rodney gives Hattie's Columbia seat to his niece Alana and ships Hattie off to Alaska. Lydia says yes in front of the room, then calls her father after nineteen years, and he already has news.
My husband stood up in front of fifty officers and gave our daughter's college seat to his niece.
He did it with a glass of bourbon in his hand, at his own promotion dinner.
"To family," he said, and his voice caught. "To my brother's girl, who starts at Columbia this fall."
The room clapped.
Our daughter sat across from me with her napkin folded into a tight square.
She had been admitted to Columbia in March, in architecture.
At fourteen she had built a balsa-wood model of the Brooklyn Bridge, and she had never wanted anything else.
His niece pressed both hands to her chest, glowing.
She had her phone up in her left hand to film the toast.
My husband's niece had lived in our house for seven years, since the year she turned twelve, and I had braided her hair on her first morning in it.
"Thank you, Uncle Rodney," she said to the camera. "I won't let you down."
She put the phone down and picked up her knife and fork the way she always did, with her left hand leading.
Rodney ate left-handed too, and Alana sat beside him doing the same.
Nobody else at our table was left-handed.
I noticed it and didn't think about it.
Rodney wasn't finished.
"And Hattie." He turned to her, smiling. "My girl is going to serve her country."
Hattie's face went white.
"Hattie has a place at an Army-run nursing program in Alaska," he said. "Discipline. Structure. Exactly what she needs."
The officers murmured approval.
"Lydia will go up with her and get her settled," he said. "Two winters, and she'll thank me."
He looked right at me, warm and sure.
Something under the table touched my knee.
It was Hattie's phone.
She had passed it to me with the screen lit.
It showed the Columbia applicant portal and a red line of text, repeated six times.
Application withdrawn by parent or guardian.
Every school she had applied to.
The dates were all this morning.
I read the screen once.
I turned it face down on my lap.
Across the room my husband was shaking hands with a general.
I knew what he expected of me.
Nineteen years of being the wife who made it easy.
I had said yes to every transfer, every move, every dinner where I smiled while he talked over me.
Hattie was watching me.
Her eyes were wet and furious, and she wasn't going to say a word in this room.
She was waiting to see what I would do.
So I stood up, picked up my glass, and said, "Of course. Hattie and I will go."
Rodney beamed.
"That's my girl," he said.
The room laughed and clapped again.
Alana crossed the floor, hugged me, and whispered, "Thank you, Aunt Lydia. I'll take such good care of her room."
I kissed her cheek.
Rodney caught me by the elbow at the coat check.
"Trust me, Lyd," he said, low and gentle. "It's the best thing I've ever done for her. You'll see."
"I trust you," I said.
He slid an envelope into my purse.
It held two tickets to Anchorage, for Thursday morning.
"No time to waste," he said, and kissed my forehead.
He smelled like bourbon and starch.
Hattie stood a few feet away holding her coat, and he didn't look at her once.
Alana ran past with her phone in her hand, calling that she'd post the toast for everyone back home.
We drove home in separate cars, because he had more handshakes to give.
Hattie didn't speak the whole way.
At our front door she stopped and said, very quietly, "Mom, you said yes."
"I did," I said. "Go up and pack nothing."
She stared at me.
"Pack nothing," I said again. "Leave it all in the drawers where he can see it."
She went upstairs.
I waited until I heard Rodney's car in the driveway, his key in the lock, and his heavy tread on the stairs.
Then I waited until the whole house was quiet.
At two in the morning I sat on the cold kitchen floor with the cordless phone and dialed a number I had never written down anywhere.
I had known it by heart for nineteen years.
It rang once.
Then a rough old voice said, "Lydia."
I couldn't speak.
"I have been sitting by this phone since the day you left," my father said. "Don't get on that plane to Alaska."
"How do you know about Alaska?"
"Your daughter has been writing to me for two years," he said. "She sent me her portfolio in March, and I sent it to London."
My hand tightened on the phone.
"She won, Lydia," my father said. "She won a full scholarship to the Architectural Association, and she doesn't know yet."
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