The Silence Between Us: A Vow to Return novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Table Nine

Hannah walks into Mercer Capital, where Kendra is warm and helpful and Harold is smooth, and finds the dinner seating chart with her name at table nine.

On Monday morning I walked into the lobby of Mercer Capital in jeans and my grandmother's gray coat.

The receptionist knew me by sight and still asked me to wait for a badge.

"Hannah!"

Kendra was crossing the marble floor toward me with a folder under her arm and her hair tied in a low knot.

"I'm so glad you came in," she said. "Nathan told me you were up at the lake. Are you okay?"

She sounded like she meant it.

That was the trouble with her. I had checked, and I couldn't find the seam.

"I need to see Harold," I said.

"Of course. Let me walk you up. He's between calls until ten."

She signed for my badge herself and clipped it to my coat pocket.

In the elevator she held out a paper cup.

"Oat milk, one sugar," she said. "I saw you in the coffee line once and remembered."

It was exactly right.

I took it because I was cold and because I had no reason to refuse.

"Kendra, why were you at Lantern Room?"

She turned and looked straight at me.

"Because Nathan asked me to meet him somewhere that wasn't the office," she said. "And I should have said no. I'm sorry it landed on you that way."

The doors opened on the forty-first floor.

"That's all I can say," she said, softer. "Truly. Go see him."

She walked me to the corner office and tapped on the open door.

"Harold? Hannah's here."

Harold Mercer stood up from behind a desk the size of a dinner table.

He was sixty-five, broad in the shoulders, with silver hair brushed straight back, and he had never once in seven years called me anything but "my dear."

"My dear," he said. "What a surprise."

Kendra closed the door behind me.

"Sit," he said. "You've driven a long way. Margaret will be sorry she missed you."

"Margaret doesn't know I'm here."

"Then she'll be sorry later."

I did not sit.

"Harold, did you tell my husband to keep something from me?"

He took his time.

He picked up a gold pen from the blotter and set it down square with the edge of the desk.

"A man keeps firm business from his wife," he said. "Especially a wife who writes books."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's a precaution." He smiled, patiently. "Novelists publish."

"I'm not asking about the firm."

"Aren't you?"

His two fingers tapped the blotter, once, twice.

I looked at his face and I could not read it.

I have written two novels about people who lie well, and I couldn't read it.

"Nathan drove to my cottage at dawn on Friday," I said. "He told me he can't tell me something and that you're the reason."

Harold's smile did not move.

"He's a good boy," he said. "Loyal to a fault."

"So you did tell him."

"I told him it would keep until the fourteenth." He came around the desk and took my elbow gently. "The Founders' Dinner, my dear. Thirty years of this firm. You'll be there, of course, in a seat of honor, and everything will be said in its time."

"What will be said?"

"Everything that should be."

"By whom?"

"By me." He patted my hand. "I'm very good at timing. Ask my wife."

He walked me to the door.

His assistant's desk stood just outside, and on it, face up, was a printed seating chart for the dinner, the kind with every name typed into a little round table.

Table One was at the head of the ballroom.

I saw Harold's name and Margaret's, and the name beside them: Nathan Mercer.

Beside Nathan, on his left, was Kendra Shaw.

I turned my head.

Table Nine was on the far side of the room, next to the kitchen doors.

I found my own name there, between a retired accountant and the man who owned the catering company.

"Oh," Harold said, behind me, a little too lightly. "A draft. My office handles these things."

I picked up the page and held it in front of him.

"Is this a draft or is it the plan?"

His fingers tapped once on the doorframe.

"It's a seat in the room, my dear. You'll be in the room."

"I know I will," I said.

I folded the chart in half and put it in my coat pocket.

"I'll sit wherever you like, Harold. But I'll be there."

He opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded.

The elevator doors were open when I turned.

Kendra was waiting inside with her hand on the button.

She looked at my face and then at the folded corner of paper sticking out of my pocket.

"Hannah," she said, very gently. "I didn't make that chart."

"I didn't say you did."

She held the doors for me anyway.

I stepped in, and I did not look at her, and I did not put out my hand.

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