genuinely, and said, “This is exactly what I needed.”
He asked if something was wrong and it all came out in one breathless stream. She thought Leo was on a bender. Or that he’d skipped town. She told him about the accident, about the night in the hospital and how she’d become complicit in silencing the poor girl who had gone to work one night and ended up minus a foot. She told him about her story and how she’d given it to Leo and then he had, essentially, vanished. She told him about the Tuck nightmares. She finished pale and depleted. The quick pulse at the corner of her eye was beating as if there were tiny wings trapped beneath the skin.
Paul watched her as she spoke, enjoying—perhaps more than he should have—the slow realization that he had the thing she was looking for. The natty leather folder had been sitting in his office for days, ever since he’d seen Leo saunter away from the waterfront bench with some woman who wasn’t Stephanie. He assumed the leather bag belonged to one of them and had put it in his office for safekeeping. He’d left a message for Leo saying he had it, but Bea’s recent report explained why Leo wasn’t responding to—or maybe even getting—his messages.
Paul would be lying if he said that he didn’t estimate—as Bea was talking—how the depth of her relief and gratitude toward him would increase in direct proportion to her visible distress. He could have stopped her, but he let her go on. He wasn’t even listening to what she said as much as watching her lips move, eyeing the pink flush that crept out the top of her white blouse and worked its way up her neck, watching her furiously fight off tears and try to steady her chin.
“What do you think?” she finally said. He realized she had stopped talking and was staring at him staring at her.
“Think?” he managed.
“Where do you think he is? What he’s doing?”
“I don’t know where Leo is or what he’s doing,” Paul said, walking over to his office and coming back with Bea’s satchel. “But is this what you’re talking about?” He handed it to her and she gasped.
“Oh my God,” she said. “How do you have this? Did Leo leave this for you?”
Had Leo left it for him? “Maybe?” Paul said to Bea.
Bea was loosening the straps and she pulled out the stack of pages. “They’re marked up,” she said. “He marked them up.”
“Leo?”
“Yes, this is Leo’s writing.” Quickly flipping through, she saw scribbling on almost every page in the blue pencil Leo favored and in his tiny crimped hand and in their shared and peculiar vernacular (use, use with caution, do not use).
“He read it,” she said, not really believing it yet. The pages in her hands, marked with Leo’s edits, had to be his way of giving her—if not approval—permission. Because she knew Leo. If he wanted the story to go away, he never would have taken the time to sit and make it better. He would have burned the pages in Stephanie’s hearth. He would have deposited the entire bundle into a trash can on the street. He would have dumped the whole thing into the river. If she knew anything, she knew that. But he hadn’t. She looked for a longer note on the last page that might offer some kind of explanation, a clearer benediction, but there wasn’t one.
She flipped back to the beginning. “What?” Paul said, seeing the look on her face, the wonder and relief. It was right there, right on the first page where Leo had crossed out the name she’d chosen for her character, “Marcus,” and in its place wrote “Archie” and in the left-hand margin, underlined twice: use.
CHAPTER THIRTY–TWO
Nora and Louisa were not used to being the center of attention at a family gathering and they liked it. When they arrived at Jack and Walker’s place, their parents and Bea were already there. As they entered the living room, folding their rickety black street umbrellas, all motion and conversation stopped. The girls, at sixteen, were mesmerizing to the assembled crowd in a way they hadn’t been when they were shy little girls who buried their faces in their father’s meaty thigh at the occasional family event.
Louisa was the spitting image of Melody as a teenager, so much so that Jack was staring at her uneasily, atavistically braced for the familiar visage from the past to crumple