Chapter 20: The Crit

Rodney's POV

I landed at Heathrow with an order not to leave New York folded in my breast pocket.

I had read it on the plane, twice, and put it back.

The general could suspend a star.

He could not stop a father from walking into his daughter's school.

I found Bedford Square at nine on Thursday morning, in the rain, in a pressed suit and a dress tie.

There was a porter at the door of the building.

I told him I was the parent of a student who had a review that day.

It was true.

He pointed me up three flights of stairs.

The studio at the top was a long white room full of drafting tables and cardboard.

Models stood along the walls, each lit by a lamp.

A panel of six tutors in black sat at the far end.

Hattie stood in front of them.

She had a model on the table beside her, a library the size of a suitcase, with the roof cut open.

I stayed in the doorway at the back.

My daughter held a pointer in her right hand, as her mother did.

Her voice was steady.

"The reading room is the only space in the building with a window to the street," she said.

"Everything else faces inward. People who need quiet get the light."

One of the tutors, an old man with a white beard, nodded slowly.

I had never heard her explain anything.

At home she had put her drawings in drawers.

I had called them her little hobby.

I watched six strangers lean forward to hear her.

Something went through me that I will not call pride.

It was nearer to the feeling of being robbed.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Colonel's Daughter Is Gone from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.