When He Finally Chose Me I Was Gone novel · Chapter 26 of 32
Chapter 26: Two Pages
Soren's POV
Astrid rang the bell at ten on Friday night, and I opened the door because I had decided not to hide from her.
She stood on the step in a camel coat, with her hair down for the first time in my memory.
Her hands had healed, but a shiny patch still showed on the knuckle of her left hand.
"May I come in?" she said. "I won't stay."
"Come in."
She did not sit in the parlor.
She stood in the hall under the lamp where she had stood a hundred times, and she looked at the stairs.
"You've been ignoring my calls for nine months," she said.
"Yes."
"I haven't done anything to deserve that."
"You rang the people who bought your mother's cottage," I said. "You asked them for a biscuit tin."
Her face did not change.
It was the one thing about her I had never been able to read, how little it ever changed.
"My mother's things," she said. "Is that a crime?"
"No."
"Then what do you want from me?"
"Nothing tonight. You came to me."
She drew a breath.
Then she did something I had not seen since we were children, and she began to cry.
It was quiet and real, and it ran down her face without any help.
"I was nine," she said. "I was a little girl, Soren. A grown woman put a towel in my hand and said sit with him, and I sat with you. I held your hand while you were blue. You remember that."
"I remember a face above me," I said. "I've been told for twenty-three years whose it was."
"It was mine."
"Was it?"
"You can't know."
"No," I said. "I can't. But the director's own book says you were dry, and I don't think a nine-year-old can invent that."
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