Chapter 9: Mother

I did not let her in. I stood in the doorway with my arm across it.

"How did you find me?" I said.

"Anson Keyes's hotel is in the newspaper tonight. A photographer saw you come in with him."

She said it as if it were an apology for the intrusion.

"Wynne, please. Ten minutes. Then you can shut the door in my face forever."

"Good. I like that plan."

I let her walk past me.

She sat on the white sofa with her coat still buttoned.

I took the chair across from her and set my phone on the glass table, face up.

The red dot glowed where she could see it.

"I'm recording," I said.

"I know," she said. "I would, too."

She pulled her veil off and folded it in her lap.

Under the lamp she looked older than she had in the ballroom, and smaller, a woman who had spent years pinning herself together.

"You were the strong one," she said. "Even at three. Lila cried at everything, and you picked her up when she fell."

"Don't."

"You made me watch you swim in the lake house pond when you were five."

"You swam out so far that I screamed."

"I remember the pond."

"Of course you do." She smiled with her mouth shaking. "I kept your room, Wynne. Nobody has touched it. The yellow bedspread, the horse posters."

"Why?"

"Because I never believed you were gone."

I leaned forward. "You buried me."

"Preston buried you."

"You stood at the grave."

"I stood at an empty grave and told myself it was a kind of prayer."

"And the rest?" I said. "The state home? The name?"

Her fingers worked the edge of the veil.

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