The Silence Between Us: A Vow to Return novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Her Letters

Kendra came on Saturday afternoon, alone, in a rental car, with a shoebox on the passenger seat.

I saw her from the kitchen window, sitting behind the wheel with the engine off.

She sat there for a full ten minutes.

"She's not coming in," Nathan said, behind me.

"She will."

"How do you know?"

"I sat in a car outside my mother's house once," I said, "for twenty minutes, before I could say I was getting married."

He put his hand between my shoulder blades, lightly, and I leaned back against it.

"Do you want me to go out?"

"I want you to wait. She's coming to you."

Rule three, I thought.

It held for everyone.

The car door opened at last.

Kendra walked up the gravel in jeans and a gray sweater, with the shoebox held against her stomach in both arms.

Without the blazer she looked younger.

She stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

"I know I'm not invited," she said.

"You are," I said. "I'm inviting you."

She looked at me, startled, and then at Nathan in the doorway.

"I came to say I'm sorry," she said. "To you both. I practiced it in the car."

"Go ahead," Nathan said.

"I told a reporter your wife was unwell. I let her think you were having an affair. I did it because I was afraid you would stop being mine the minute you were hers."

Nobody spoke.

A gull cried out over the lake.

"I'm not asking you to say it's all right," Kendra said. "I'm asking you to know I know."

Nathan came down the steps.

He stopped on the bottom one, so that their eyes were level.

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