Chapter 5
Malik didn’t come with us.
He stayed at the clinic to make his own copy of the audit record, then looked at me over the reception desk. “If they’re watching me, they may be watching you, too.”
“I’m sorry I brought you into it.”
“You didn’t.” He put his phone away. “Someone else did, a long time ago.”
Catherine drove. I watched the streets slide past, the photocopied authorization pressing against my ribs inside my jacket. At the next red light, she glanced at me.
“You’re going to Richard’s office.”
“I’m going to talk to Daniel.”
“He’s been there since the funeral,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Or he was yesterday.”
The Carter firm occupied two floors of a stone building with a brass directory and a lobby that smelled of lemon polish. The receptionist recognized me. Her eyes flicked to my uniform, then to Catherine, and her practiced smile faltered.
“Mr. Carter is in a meeting.”
“Which one?”
She hesitated. “Richard or Daniel?”
“Daniel.”
A moment later, he appeared in the hallway. His tie was loosened, and he looked as though he’d been waiting for a call he didn’t want to answer.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Trying to find out what you know.”
His gaze settled on the paper in my hand. “About the report?”
“About this.” I held it up. “Someone put my name on a medical authorization dated after I’d left Kandahar. The lot number matches a shipment Malik’s team quarantined.”
Daniel’s face tightened, but he didn’t reach for the page.
“I never saw that before.”
“Did Dad show you anything like it?”
“No.”
“Did you handle the family mail while I was deployed?”
His eyes moved briefly to Catherine. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes what?”
“Dad had me sort it. The firm got mail for the house. I separated the business stuff from the family stuff.”
“And the family stuff?”
“I put it where he told me.”
The answer landed between us, small and cold.
“Did you open my letters?”
“No.” His voice sharpened. “I never opened your sealed letters, Ev—Evelyn.”
I looked at him until the correction stopped sounding like respect and began sounding like distance.
“You were the one sorting them. You knew I was trying to reach Grandpa?”
“I don’t know what you sent him.”
“Did you ever see a letter from him to me?”
He rubbed a thumb along the edge of his watch. “Dad said Grandpa didn’t want to hear from you. He said you’d made your choice.”
“And you believed him.”
“I was twenty-something, trying to keep the family from falling apart.”
“You helped decide what the rest of us got to know.”
Daniel’s jaw flexed. “I didn’t write those messages.”
“No. You just passed them along.”
“I said I sorted mail. I didn’t say I carried letters between you.”
His answer was quick enough to feel rehearsed, though I couldn’t tell whether he’d practiced it or simply needed it to be true.
Catherine stepped closer. “Daniel, Raymond kept things. If there are letters, we need to see them.”
Daniel looked toward the conference room, where someone laughed behind the glass. Then he took his coat from the back of a chair.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”
The house seemed smaller in daylight, but not safer. We entered through the front door and kept to the hall. I had no intention of turning the study into another argument about who’d been there first. The desk drawer opened with the brass key Raymond had left me.
Inside lay a stack of paper, held with a fraying rubber band. Beneath it sat several returned envelopes. Catherine lifted them out carefully and laid them on the desk.
Each bore Raymond’s handwriting. Each bore my name and the address where I’d lived. Each had been stamped UNDELIVERABLE.
I touched one of the envelopes. The stamp was purple, its edges blurred. My address was clear.
“He kept all of them,” Catherine whispered.
I couldn’t answer. For years I’d told myself that no letter meant no letter. That silence had been a choice, even if I’d never understood whose.
Daniel picked up an envelope, then set it down without opening it. “These could have come back for any reason.”
“Then why are there copies?” I asked.
The papers in the drawer were folded into a separate bundle. One was a copy of a letter supposedly from Raymond to me. Another was addressed to him, in a typed format that resembled a letter I might have sent from overseas.
The first carried a brief sentence: You chose your life. Please don’t contact me again.
My throat tightened.
The copy beneath it showed the reply attributed to me: I understand. I won’t write again.
Catherine covered her mouth. Daniel stared at the page.
“That isn’t what I wrote,” I said.
“I know,” he murmured.
I looked at him. “How?”
He didn’t answer. He’d moved to a third sheet, a photocopy of a draft letter. Gray pencil marks crossed the page, faint but unmistakable. A line had been struck through and replaced in the margin: Change this to: I don’t want further contact.
Daniel went still.
“What?” I asked.
He turned the paper toward the window. His fingers trembled once, then closed around its edge.
“That handwriting,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Whose?”
May you like
He raised his eyes to mine.
“My father’s.”
