Chapter 6: The Favor
Richard called before Tasha had finished driving me back to my quarters. His name appeared on my screen, and for a moment I watched it ring, the phone warm against my good hand.
“Linda sent me to get Kyle’s phone,” he said when I answered. “She says he’s put the whole family at risk.”
“Did she send you, or did you decide to go?”
The silence that followed was small, but I heard him swallow.
“She told me she’d tell everyone what I’ve done. What I failed to do. She said I owed her this.”
I looked at the splint on my left arm. The skin around it throbbed with every bump in the road. “And what do you owe Kyle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then don’t make him hand over anything for you.”
“I won’t.” His voice faltered. “Natalie, there’s something else. That envelope Kyle showed you—the one addressed to me. Linda handled the mail when you were deployed. I didn’t think about it then.”
I turned toward the window. The passing pines blurred into a dark green wall. “You never thought to ask?”
“No.”
That answer hurt more than an excuse would have. I closed my eyes, then opened them before the road could disappear.
“Where are you now?”
“At home. Kyle’s here. Linda left a few minutes ago, but she’ll be back.”
“Why tell me that?”
“Because I think the envelope may be here. And because I’m tired of pretending I didn’t notice things.”
I let the words sit between us. Tired wasn’t the same as sorry. It wasn’t the same as changing. But something in his voice had shifted—not into courage, exactly, but toward the place where a person might decide whether to reach for it.
“Tasha’s driving,” I said. “I’ll come. We’re not taking Kyle’s phone, and I’m not promising you anything.”
“I understand.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I know.”
When we pulled up, Kyle stood just inside the front door with his phone in one hand. He looked past me at Tasha, then back at my splint.
“Dad called you?”
“He did.”
“He says Linda’s coming back.”
“I know.”
“Then we should be quick.”
Inside, the house smelled like furniture polish and the lemon cleaner Linda used whenever she expected company. A framed family photo sat on the entry table: Richard, Linda, and Kyle smiling on a beach, their shoulders touching. I was nowhere in it. There hadn’t been an argument about that. I’d simply stopped being included, one invitation at a time.
Richard waited in the study. A desk lamp cast a bright circle over the blotter, leaving the room’s corners dim. He had pulled two drawers open and set a stack of old folders on the floor.
“Did you know she kept my mail?” I asked.
“No.” He looked up, then down again. “I knew she brought it in. Sometimes she sorted it.”
“That’s not the same thing as knowing what happened to it.”
“No.” He rubbed his thumb over the edge of a folder. “It isn’t.”
Kyle took his place by the open doorway. His phone stayed in his hand, screen turned inward.
“I’ll keep watch,” he said.
I glanced at him. “You don’t have to protect us from her.”
“I’m not.” He lifted his chin, but his eyes were unsettled. “I’m making sure she doesn’t get my phone.”
“Good.”
Richard crouched beside a low cabinet beneath the bookcase. One side had been pushed too close to the wall; a pale line in the dust showed where it had once stood. He gripped the cabinet’s edge and tried to shift it. It barely moved.
“Let me,” I said.
My broken arm answered before I could take a step. Pain lanced up to my shoulder, sharp enough to make the room tilt.
Richard stopped. For a second, his hand hovered near my elbow. Then he lowered it without touching me.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
It wasn’t much. But he didn’t ask me to make it easier for him by pretending I was fine.
He braced both hands against the cabinet and shoved. The wood scraped across the floor with a rough, dragging sound. Behind it, where the wall met the baseboard, a narrow gap opened. Something pale showed in the darkness.
Kyle left the doorway. “What is that?”
Richard leaned down and reached into the gap. He pulled out a bundle tied with a faded blue ribbon. Dust clung to his knuckles. He set it on the desk as carefully as if it might break.
My breath caught. The top envelope had my handwriting on it. So did the one beneath it, and the one beneath that. My name was on some. Richard’s was on others.
I had written those loops and slants in a tent, in a transport, in whatever corner I could find where the paper wouldn’t blow away. I remembered the scratch of a pen, the grit that got between the page and my palm. I didn’t remember which of those letters I’d written first.
“Is that all of them?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Richard stared at the bundle. “I didn’t know there were any.”
A familiar ache stirred under the pain in my arm: the old, foolish wish that there might be a sentence somewhere that could explain all the years between us. I hated that the hope came so easily. I hated more that part of me still wanted him to deserve it.
He started to reach for the ribbon, then stopped. “I should’ve asked you.”
“Yes.”
“I should’ve wondered why I never heard from you.”
I watched his face, waiting for the turn—the part where his regret became a reason I was supposed to comfort him. It didn’t come. Not yet.
A car door slammed outside.
Kyle went rigid. He looked toward the front of the house, then at his phone. “She’s back.”
Richard’s hand closed over the edge of the desk.
The front door opened. Linda’s steps crossed the entry hall, quick and certain. She appeared in the study doorway, eyes moving from Kyle’s phone to the displaced cabinet, then to the bundle on the desk.
“What did you do?” she asked Richard.
His face had gone pale, but he stayed between her and the desk.
“Found these.”
Linda’s mouth tightened. “They aren’t yours to dig through.”
“They’re addressed to me,” he said.
“Not anymore.”
The words landed with the flat force of a door slammed in my face. For an instant, Richard looked at her as if he’d heard a stranger speak in his house.
“You said you were handling the mail,” he said.
“I was.”
“You told me she never wrote.”
Linda glanced at me. “I told you what you needed to know.”
“No,” I said. My voice was quiet, but it held. “You told him what kept him from having to ask.”
Her expression hardened. “You don’t know what was going on in this family.”
“I know I was here. I know I wrote to him.”
Richard looked down at the bundle. His hand hovered over it, then pulled back, as if even touching the envelopes might confirm how much time he’d lost.
Linda stepped toward the desk.
Kyle moved into her path. “Don’t.”
For a beat, she looked ready to shove past him. Then her gaze caught on his phone. She smiled without warmth.
“You think you can keep making choices that hurt everyone and call it honesty?”
“I think I can keep my phone.”
“Natalie,” Richard said, but he didn’t ask me to make Linda stop. He didn’t ask me to leave or smooth over the moment.
I stood beside the desk, my splinted arm held close. “Those are mine. Nobody opens them without me.”
Linda’s eyes flashed. “You always did think the world owed you an explanation.”
“No,” I said. “I think I’m owed my own letters.”
May you like
Richard lowered his eyes to the envelopes. Slowly, he lifted the top one. His thumb brushed the ink along the front, and his face changed.
He recognized the handwriting he once claimed he never received.
