Chapter 3: The Bruise Beneath Her Sleeve
For a moment, no one moved. Rebecca stood with one hand still on the doorknob, listening to the quiet outside as if the person asking about Christina might be standing on the porch now.
“Did they give a name?” I asked.
“No. Just asked whether she’d been here.”
Christina’s arms tightened around Leo. He had taken a crayon drawing from the bed and was smoothing its folded corner against her knee. I could see a blue square window and a crooked roof, the kind of house a three-year-old made from memory.
“Rebecca, take him into the kitchen for a minute,” Christina said.
Leo looked up at her.
“Just a minute, honey.”
Rebecca held out her hand. Leo hesitated, then went with her, clutching the drawing. When the door clicked shut, Christina drew her sleeve back from her wrist.
A dark mark ringed the inside of her forearm. Another, fainter one sat near her elbow.
I didn’t ask her to explain what I could already guess.
“Florence did that?”
“She grabbed me when I tried to take the papers.” Christina’s voice was level, but her fingers picked at a loose thread on her cuff. “Then she hit me. I stumbled into the table.”
My throat tightened. I kept my hands at my sides.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “I did. I told you something was wrong. You told me I needed to give her time.”
I had said it gently, I remembered. As if gentleness made the words less of a dismissal.
“I believed what she told me about you,” I said.
“That I resented her.”
“I didn’t ask you what happened. I should have.”
“No,” Christina said. “You didn’t.”
The little crease between her eyebrows deepened. For once, I didn’t reach for a defense that would smooth it over. I let the silence remain hers.
“I saw the papers in a folder,” she continued. “There was more than one. The one on the drive was the page I managed to photograph.”
I remembered the false signature beneath my name: close enough to fool someone who wanted to be fooled.
“What did it authorize?”
“The sale of the lakeside house.”
The room seemed to shift around that sentence. I knew the house she meant: the weathered place my late wife had loved, with its screened porch and narrow path down to the water. Christina had spent summers there. After her mother died, the house remained one of the few places where the family could still gather without pretending grief had left us.
“Your mother left it to the family,” I said.
“She left it for us. For me, for Leo—” Christina stopped, swallowing. “It was where I thought he could grow up knowing her.”
I looked toward the door, though Leo was in the kitchen. His drawing had gone with him.
“Did Florence tell you why she wanted to sell it?”
“She said the house was an expense. That you’d agreed it was time to let it go.” Christina’s mouth tightened. “But you hadn’t.”
“No.”
“Then I showed her the signature.”
The almost-right curve of my name came back to me. I had recognized its shape before I understood what it meant.
“What happened to the original papers?”
“They disappeared during the struggle.” She rubbed her forearm, then caught herself and dropped her hand. “I kept the drive. I knew if I left it there, she’d take that, too.”
“Did you see anyone else?”
Christina hesitated. “Not inside the apartment.”
It wasn’t an answer to a different question, and I didn’t press her to make it one. Rebecca came back without Leo, and the tightness in the room eased by a fraction.
“He’s looking for tape,” she said. “He wants to fix the corner of his drawing.”
“I can help,” I said.
“He wants me.”
The words landed cleanly. I nodded.
“Of course.”
I went to the front window instead. Rebecca’s curtains were parted only a little, but I could see the street and the parked cars along the curb. A sedan rolled past slowly. The driver kept his eyes forward.
“Was that the one?” I asked.
Rebecca came to stand beside me. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the person who asked.”
The sedan turned the corner. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, then heard another engine.
This time the car slowed in front of the house.
I recognized it before I recognized the driver.
Claude Mercer sat behind the wheel, his face half-shadowed by the windshield. He had advised me for years, helped me sort through the practical messes I was too tired to manage, and joined our family dinners often enough that I’d stopped thinking of him as a visitor.
He looked toward Rebecca’s house.
Then the car rolled on.
“What is it?” Christina asked from behind me.
“Claude Mercer.”
Her expression changed—not surprise exactly, but a sudden stillness, as if a piece had dropped into place.
“You know he was here?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. I’m asking.”
She glanced toward the window. “I saw him once before. Outside my building. I thought it was a coincidence.”
“When?”
“Before Florence came over yesterday.”
I turned from the glass. “Did you tell her?”
“I didn’t know it mattered.”
The sedan had stopped at the end of the block. I couldn’t see Claude clearly now, only the dark shape of the car between the trees.
Rebecca lowered her voice. “Jonathan, maybe we should move them somewhere else.”
“We can,” I said. “But I’m not going to make Christina carry this alone.”
Christina’s eyes held mine. “You can’t undo what you believed.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t know what I believe about you yet.”
“I know that, too.”
Her face didn’t soften. But she didn’t look away.
May you like
Outside, the sedan pulled from the curb and disappeared beyond the corner. I watched until the street was empty.
“Claude had access to your signature samples,” Christina said. “He’s the one who kept them.”
