Chapter 14: Do Both

Doran's POV

My mother was awake at ten that night, which she hadn't been in a month.

She sat at Hal's kitchen table in her wool coat, with her handbag on her knees and her keys in her fist.

"I'm going home," she told me.

"You are home, Mom."

"Don't be silly. Home has a staircase."

I knelt beside her and took the keys out of her hand, one finger at a time, and she let me.

"Tomorrow I have to say something in front of a lot of people," I said. "I did something wrong, and I kept quiet about it for a year and a half."

She studied me.

"Did you hurt somebody?"

"I let somebody get hurt."

"Is it the sort of wrong where you apologize, or the sort where you pay?"

"Both."

"Then do both, and do it standing up." She patted my cheek. "Your father mumbled. Don't mumble."

For a moment she was the woman who raised me on a cook's wages.

Then she looked at the window and asked if the bus had come.

I walked her to bed, sat on the porch and tried once more to say it out loud to the dark yard.

"I'm Doran Danforth. I was Elora Hollin's nurse. I saw her walk."

It sounded small, and I would need it to carry across a ballroom.

Footsteps crossed the gravel, and I knew them before she came into the porch light.

Melina had her arms crossed, and her jacket was zipped to the chin.

"Hal said you'd be out here," she said.

"I'm practicing."

"I heard. You're mumbling."

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