The Twin Missing From the Family Photo novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Quiet Version

Talbot's POV

Carrie's mother sent both twins to bed with a kiss on each forehead and one sentence: "We'll talk in the morning."

Then she took my coat off the hook herself and walked me out onto the porch.

It was twenty-eight degrees.

She did not seem to feel it.

"You're a very kind man," she said, "to come all this way for a girl who isn't well."

"She seems well to me."

"She's had a hard year." Mrs. Unsworth folded her arms inside the pink cardigan. "I read something tonight, Mr. Ward. A page my husband wrote a very long time ago. It was a bad night, in a storm, with no help. A doctor made a hard call."

"Carrie read it to you?"

"I read it myself." She smiled. "It doesn't say what she thinks it says."

She was lying, and she was good at it.

Her eyes stayed on mine and her voice stayed light.

I had stood on a porch like this one, in a black suit, while my own mother explained to a neighbor that my sister had always been a difficult girl.

I knew that smile from the inside.

"What would you like from me?" I said.

"I'd like this to be quiet." She took an envelope from her cardigan pocket. "Gordon will put the trust back, every dollar, with interest. Carrie will have it by Monday. Your company's table at the gala will be doubled, with the Foundation's thanks. And on Saturday night she will sit beside you and clap for her father."

She held out the envelope.

I did not take it.

"That's generous," I said.

"I think so."

"Does it include the part where she says out loud that she took her sister's air?"

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