Chapter 21: The Door Code

Graham's POV

I went out the side door because I could not stand in that room for another second.

The Drake's doorman looked at me and looked away.

Snow was coming down on Michigan Avenue in big slow flakes.

I stood under the awning and watched Tom's mother help her daughter into the back of a town car.

Daphne did not look at me.

She sat with her hands in her lap and her face turned to the far window. Her back was straight.

Tom's mother shut the door and came over to me through the snow, small in her purple coat.

"Don't follow it," she said. "That one is mine to do."

"I know."

"You were a good boy to him, Graham. Better than he knew.

"Go back in there and be a good man to that girl."

She patted my cheek once and got in beside her daughter.

The car pulled out into the snow, and the taillights went red at the corner.

I stood on the curb.

I had been braced for eight years.

I had braced for every call, every cancelled plan and every Sunday dinner.

I had not known I was doing it until it was over.

My knees went.

I sat down on the freezing curb in my dinner suit, with my elbows on my knees.

I put my face in my hands.

I cried for Tom, in the front seat, who never got to be thirty.

I cried for the girl in the back who had spent eight years afraid I would turn around.

I cried for the nine days I'd been an associate chief, which was also stupid.

I did not hear the crutches until they stopped next to me.

Jo stood in the snow in the blue dress, with her coat over her shoulders and her breath showing.

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