Chapter 9: The Room Where She Was Waiting
Delia was being discharged the following morning.
I arrived before the paperwork was finished and sat in the chair Marcus had occupied two days before.
She was dressed and ready, her coat on, her bag on the bed beside her, the splinted fingers resting carefully in her lap.
She looked better than she had any right to after two days in a hospital bed.
She also looked like someone who had been waiting to ask a question and had been deciding for some time whether to ask it.
"You found him," she said.
"I found him."
She let out a breath.
It was small and quiet and she turned her face slightly to the side when she did it, the way people do when they don't want to be seen feeling something.
"Is he all right?" she said.
"He's in Chicago.
He came back with me last night." I paused.
"He asked about you.
When I told him what happened — what Celeste did — he wanted to come to the hospital.
I told him to wait."
She looked at her hands.
"You didn't have to do that."
"He wanted to apologize.
For disappearing.
For not finding a way back sooner." I watched her face.
"He said he remembered you.
From the fire."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I was seventeen.
He didn't know my name.
He just picked me up off the ground and carried me to the sidewalk and told me to keep my eyes open." She paused.
"I kept my eyes open.
I've been keeping them open ever since."
"He knows your name now."
She looked up at me.
"Delia Marie Marlowe," I said.
"My driver knew it before I did.
My brother will not forget it."
She almost smiled.
It was the first time I had seen anything close to it on her face, and it changed everything about the room.
"Celeste," she said.
"What happened?"
"She's been charged.
The fraud complaint is filed.
The forged document is in evidence." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees.
"She won't be coming back to the house."
"And Garrett Foss?"
"He's cooperating with the investigation.
He'll face consequences for the skimming and for his part in hiding Ewan.
His cooperation buys him some latitude, not immunity."
She nodded slowly.
"Your mother," she said.
"She needs to be told.
About Ewan.
She needs to hear it — even if she can't respond.
She needs to know."
"I know." I stood up.
"I was hoping you'd come with me."
She looked at me.
"You've been in that room every night for two years," I said.
"You know how she responds to a voice she trusts.
I don't want her to hear it from me alone and have no one there who knows what she needs after."
Delia picked up her bag from the bed.
"Then let's go."
We drove to the estate in the late morning light, the snow from two nights ago still thick on the ground but the sky fully clear now, the kind of blue that feels like an apology for everything that came before it.
Ewan was waiting in the front hallway when we arrived.
He had his coat on, as though he hadn't been sure he was allowed to take it off.
He saw Delia come through the door and stopped.
She stopped too.
They looked at each other across the hallway — the man who had carried her out of a fire and the woman who had spent four years making sure his story didn't disappear — and neither of them said anything for a long moment.
Then Ewan said: "You kept looking."
May you like
"You kept being worth looking for," she said.
I left them in the hallway and went upstairs alone.
