Slowly, I stand and take the check and sit back down to read it. There are far too many zeros. I look back at him. “I can’t accept this,” I say.
“Nonsense,” he says. “I know you suffered an injury to your hand from the same man my daughter was … investigating.” He says this last word with distaste.
“You mean the same man who murdered your daughter.”
Again he waves my comment away. “Take the check, Mr. Faulkner.”
“I could buy a brand-new hand for this and have money left over.”
He nods. “Consider it payment to cover your emotional trauma.” He glances at his watch, then places his hands on his desk, a CEO closing a deal, and stands.
I pause, then stand and place the check down on his desk. “I won’t accept it,” I say. “You should donate that to a worthy charity. In Marisa’s name.”
Devereaux frowns. “I want this to be a clean break here, Mr. Faulkner,” he says.
I give him a tight smile. “You don’t need to worry,” I say. “You won’t hear from me again. I’ll show myself out.”
I leave him standing there, the check on top of the desk, and find my way down the hall and through the foyer. As I head for the front door, I pause. There is a woman in the front sitting room, wearing a monogrammed bathrobe and sitting on a couch. A younger woman in pressed nursing scrubs is standing next to her, murmuring something. The woman on the couch is at first glance beautiful, pale blonde hair and blue eyes, but there is something slightly vacant about her expression, a slackness in her jaw, her eyes dull. She has Marisa’s mouth and nose, I realize, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
Marisa’s mother turns her head to face me, the nurse glancing up but still murmuring into her ear. There is a look of confusion in her eyes now, confusion and sadness and loss. I bow my head to her. After a moment, she bows back, and her eyes shine with tears. I go out the door and close it behind me, then make my way down the steps to my car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
On Monday, when I get home from the grocery store and walk through my front door, there’s a rustle of movement from the kitchen. I put my grocery bag on the floor and pick up the fireplace poker. Then Susannah walks out of the kitchen, a bag of chips in one hand, and gives a breathless little cry when she sees me. “Jesus, you scared me,” she says.
“I scared you?”
“You’re the one carrying a poker.”
I set the poker back down on the hearth. “You broke into my house. Again.”
“Au contraire, mon frère.” She reaches into her pocket and holds up a key.
“You had a key made? When did—” I shake my head. “Never mind.”
She puts the key down on the coffee table, along with my bag of chips. “Key’s all yours. You find my stuff yet?”
After I get the groceries out of my car, we conduct a sweep of my house, and Susannah is poking around in my bedroom when I find a plastic Target bag under my couch. “Think this is it,” I call to her, and I open the bag to find a short stack of T-shirts, haphazardly folded. Then I pause and look closely at the T-shirt on top, and my breath stops, cold realization like an icicle through my brain.
Susannah is coming down the hall and saying, “Good, ’cause I hate shopping and didn’t want to—” She stops when she sees me kneeling on the floor, holding a T-shirt. “Ethan?” she says.
I hold up the T-shirt. It’s black, with the words Get Up the Yard slashed across the front. “Where did you get this?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
She’s very good. It’s only a flutter of her eyes, a slight catch, that gives anything away. Then she shrugs. “Bought it at a concert,” she says. “Athens, I think.”
“Susannah.”
She looks back at me, arms across her chest. “What?” When I don’t say anything, she frowns. “Seriously, what is—”
“Marisa was wearing this when she walked out of my house,” I say. “The last time we saw her. Before she died.”
Susannah pauses for only a moment, no more than to count one, but that pause tells me everything. “I must have bought a couple,” she says. “Impulse purchase. I was drunk; the band was—”
“Don’t lie to me,” I say.
“Ethan, seriously, what—”
“Don’t!” I shout. “Just … don’t.” I drop the shirt and feel myself sag and hang my head, as if I’m observing myself from far away. “What did you do?” I whisper.
Susannah says nothing, and then she is out the front door and gone. I stay there, kneeling on the floor of my living room, too stunned to move. It’s only when I wonder where Wilson is, and why he isn’t trying to lick me to death, that the tears come.
RONAN’S IS BUSY for a weeknight—I can see through the front windows that customers line the bar and the tables are full, and I can hear the noise as I enter the service door and walk down the short hallway to the stairwell. I climb the risers one at a time deliberately, gathering myself, and then I’m standing on the faded blue carpet runner in the upstairs hallway outside my uncle’s office. I open the office door without knocking.
Uncle Gavin is sitting behind his desk, which has its usual assortment of papers, wrappers, file folders, and other assorted junk. “Ethan,” he says, like he was expecting me.
“I just walked right up here into your office,” I say. “You might want to rethink your security. Since you’re in a
