My Substitute Wife Is Not on the Return Manifest novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Dismissed

The commander's widow would not sit until Signe's aunt had put a cup of tea in front of her.

She held the shoebox on her knees and spoke to the table.

"Brooke has not come home since the newspaper," she said. "I wanted to say that first. I'm not here for her."

"Then why are you here?" Dane asked, gently.

"Because she lied to you, and I let her." The widow lifted her eyes. "Three years ago she sent that email about an overseas program. There was no program. She spent three years in a motel in Hyannis, working a pharmacy counter, and she came to me at Christmas to cry."

Signe felt Dane go still beside her.

"I told myself it was grief," the widow said. "It was grief. It was also a girl who had learned that when she disappeared, a man would come looking."

She opened the shoebox and took out a pair of brass dividers, old and dull, with a faded paper tag tied to one leg.

"My husband kept these on his desk. He said the chart room had one person who was never wrong, and he wanted her to have them when he was done with them." She held them out across the table. "That's you, Ms. Hallowell. I think he'd have liked to have told you himself."

Signe took the dividers.

They were heavier than they looked, and warm from the widow's hands.

The tag said, in square writing: For M. Hallowell. Check my plot.

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