Chapter 14: What Cissy Kept

Hayden left Lydia asleep in the chair beside Henrietta's bed at midnight and drove to Larch Row alone.

The guest house windows were lit.

He did not knock.

Cissy was on her knees on the bedroom floor with two open suitcases, folding the green dress into tissue paper.

She looked up and did not seem surprised.

"You came to throw me out," she said.

"You were thrown out at four o'clock."

"Then you came to hit me. You've always wanted to."

"I have never wanted to hit you," Hayden said. "I wanted you to be my friend."

Her mouth trembled, and she turned it into a smile.

"I was. I held you up for three years."

"You held me down."

"Tell me one night I wasn't there."

"The night my wife had been gone a month," he said, "and I asked you if I should fly to her."

She stopped folding.

"You said her number was dead," he said. "You said she had a new man and wanted me to stop."

"She might have."

"She did not, Cissy."

"You wouldn't have been happy if you'd gone. You'd have seen her with her new life and it would have broken you."

"That was mine to see."

"I was saving you."

"You were keeping me."

Her face went blank, and then the tears came, as they always did.

He had watched that face cry for three years and had handed her a handkerchief every time.

"What do you want?" he said. "Money? The cottage?"

"I don't want your money."

"Then what?"

"I wanted you to say thank you."

He stared at her.

She was crying and meant every drop of it.

"I wanted one person in that house to say it. You, or her, or the old woman. Just once. Thank you, Cissy."

"For what?"

"For everything I did."

Hayden looked at the dressing table, at the row of Lydia's stoppered perfume bottles, and at the open laptop beside them.

The screen showed a folder.

It was labeled with two names.

Cissy saw him look.

"Don't," she said.

He crossed the room in three steps and closed the lid, and then lifted the whole machine under his arm.

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