Chapter 11: Sunday Lunch

Declan's POV

The Southwell house sat behind a stone wall on a hill, with a long lawn and a front door twice my height.

I had been inside it only a handful of times in three years.

Every one of those times I had been told where to stand.

This Sunday a housekeeper took my coat and Archie's.

A young woman in a grey cardigan offered to show Archie the koi in the garden.

Margot's hand closed on my sleeve.

"Please," she said, very low. "Let him go. Just for a little while."

I looked at her face.

She had not slept, and neither had I.

We had not spoken at breakfast, and the memory of her in the dark was a hot weight between us.

"Stay where I can see the glass doors, bud," I told Archie.

He ran off with the young woman.

Lunch was laid for four in a dining room with a table for twenty.

Alistair sat at the head with his hands folded.

Broderick sat at his right, smiling at nothing.

"Mr. Cronin. Margot. Sit."

I sat.

The soup came and went, and nobody touched it.

Then Alistair rang a small silver bell.

The housekeeper carried in a flat leather album and set it in front of me.

"Open it, please."

"I'm not here for a picture book."

"You are here for a story," Alistair said. "You have not been told it, I think. Humor an old man."

I opened it.

The first page held a photograph of a girl of about eight on a piano bench.

She wore a yellow dress and grinned with a missing front tooth.

I knew that grin.

It was Archie's.

It was exactly Archie's, and I looked at it for a long time.

"Who is she?"

"My daughter," Alistair said. "My eldest. She left this house at nineteen with a suitcase and never came back. She stopped speaking to any of us."

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