Chapter 18: Six Weeks

Daphne left before dawn.

She left her phone on the kitchen table with a note under it that said: Don't let her see it.

I copied the thread onto three drives.

I put one in the bread box and one in Byron's safe, and I mailed the third to the silver-haired woman from the club.

She had written her address on the napkin she gave me at the club.

Her answer came in five days: I sit on the board of Angell Orchards. I will see you on the twenty-seventh.

On the Saturday before the board meeting, I was six weeks and one day out of delivery, and Byron drove me to my checkup.

He had driven me to the very first one, in March.

He sat in the truck outside the clinic with Poppy asleep in her seat beside him, and I went in alone.

The doctor was a brisk woman with warm hands.

She checked me, and asked how I was sleeping, and wrote something on a chart.

"You're healing beautifully," she said. "Everything is cleared. Anything you were waiting on, you can stop waiting."

I said thank you in a normal voice.

I walked back across the lot with my face hot.

Byron looked up when I opened the door, and whatever he saw there made him look away at the windshield.

"Well?" he said.

"She says I'm fine."

"Good."

"She says I'm cleared for everything."

His hands tightened on the wheel.

He started the engine and drove all the way home without a word.

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