The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Visiting Room

"Tell him I'll think about it," I said, and shut the door.

I thought about it for two weeks.

I drove Clara back to New Haven for her sophomore year, the second try.

The car was full of boxes, and she had a framed drawing of a minke on her lap.

At her dorm she hugged me on the sidewalk in front of everyone and said, "Go. You're embarrassing me."

Then she stood there waving until I turned the corner.

On the second Tuesday of September, I went to the jail in Bridgeport.

The visiting room was beige, with plastic chairs bolted in pairs on either side of a long counter and a sheet of scratched glass between.

There was a phone on each side.

They brought him in at ten.

He'd lost the tan. His silver hair had gone flat and yellowish under the lights, and the orange suit was too big in the shoulders.

He sat down and picked up the phone and smiled at me through the glass.

It was a good smile still. He'd had it for fifty years and it was the last thing he owned.

"Marguerite. You look well."

"I'm alive. It agrees with me."

"I wanted to thank you for coming."

"You wanted something. Ask."

The smile flickered.

"The Swiss case," he said. "That's the one that matters. Here, it's money. There, they're calling it the deaths of two people."

"It was the deaths of two people."

"I never meant that." He leaned closer to the glass. "You have to believe that. I wanted you late. That's all. The Zermatt deal goes to the Germans, the board loses faith in you, and by Clan Day they listen to me. Late, Marguerite. Not dead."

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