The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Rachel

I held the studio phone with both hands.

"Yes," I said. "It's me. It's Laney."

A long, shaky breath on the line.

"Nobody's called you that in twenty years," the voice said. "Only her. And me, in my head, every Sunday."

"You're Rachel."

There was a silence so long I thought she'd hung up.

"Please," I said. "She wrote your name down. I want to hear you say it."

Then she said it.

"Rachel Ainsley."

She said it slowly, lifting something heavy off a shelf she hadn't reached in years.

"My name is Rachel Ainsley. I was eighteen. I'm from a lake town, five hours west. My mother's a nurse. Was a nurse."

Ben had gone completely still at the board.

He was writing it down on the log sheet in his neat block capitals.

"They call me something else up here," Rachel said. "I'm not going to say it. I've hated it for twenty-four years."

"You were there when I was born."

"In the back room at your grandma's. In March. It snowed." Her voice wobbled. "Verna sent me in with towels because I was new and nobody would miss me. Your mama squeezed my hand so hard she bent my ring. She said your name out loud before Verna could pick one."

I couldn't speak.

I put my forehead down on the desk beside the mic.

"I was in that room at the end, too," she said. "Two days. She talked when she could. She made me promise things."

"What things?" I said into the desk.

"That I'd put a peppermint in your hand every Sunday, so you'd know somebody on that hill was on your side. That I'd get you off it." She stopped. "Who do you think put the university's envelope inside your hymnal, the spring you were seventeen?"

I lifted my head.

I had found that envelope in the third pew, with the application inside and the fee already paid in a money order.

I'd thought it was God.

"I clean the church office," Rachel said. "I took the fee out of the collection plate, a dollar a week, for two years. I've never told anybody."

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