She Discovered Too Late novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: What Goes in the Letter

That night Arlene and I sat at the kitchen table with a pad of yellow paper and the new phone on speaker.

The housekeeper had scrubbed the floor and gone to bed.

The only sound in the house was Teddy on the line, typing.

"Okay," he said. "I have a friend in county IT. I told her I was tracing an old record for a family."

"And?"

"Nine-one-one audio from a closed medical call is kept for fifteen years. Yours is from March ninth, fourteen years ago."

I sat very still.

"It's still there, Cedric. She pulled the index entry herself. Nobody has ever requested it."

"Fifteen years," Arlene said. "That leaves one year."

"Yes. They purge it next March."

I closed my eyes.

For fourteen years I had assumed it was gone.

"Don't request it," I said. "If anyone from Ellingham Holdings hears about it first, it'll be buried by lunch."

"Then who asks for it?"

"Miriam. After."

"That's a lot of 'after' for a man in your condition," Teddy said.

His voice cracked, and he pretended it hadn't.

When he hung up, I picked up the pen.

My hand shook so badly that the first line ran off the edge of the page.

Arlene took the pen from me and wrote what I said, in neat nurse's handwriting.

We went through it slowly.

I told her what I wanted done with my body.

I told her where I wanted the ashes.

I told her what I wanted done about the building and the tenants in it.

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