Chapter 4: The Son Who Came With His Fists Already Raised
He arrived two days later.
I heard the car first — tires on gravel, engine cutting off abruptly, a door closing with more force than necessary.
I was in the kitchen.
I set down my cup and walked to the front door before he knocked.
He was tall.
Dark hair going grey at the temples.
Thomas's jaw, unmistakably.
Thomas's eyes too, though where Thomas's eyes had always been warm, Daniel's were guarded and flat.
"You're her," he said.
Not a greeting.
"I'm Eleanor," I said.
"Please come in."
He stepped inside but didn't go far.
He stood in the entryway with his coat still on, looking around the room the way someone does when they're cataloguing rather than seeing.
"Nice place," he said.
His tone made it something else entirely.
"Can I make you tea?"
"I don't want tea." He turned to face me.
"I want to understand what happened.
My father was dying and he married a woman he hadn't spoken to in fifty-five years.
I'd like to know why."
"So would I," I said.
"Fully."
That stopped him slightly.
He'd expected defense, I think.
He recalibrated.
"You were his nurse," he said.
"Yes."
"And you recognized him."
"Yes."
"And within — what — a few weeks, you were married."
"About six weeks from the day I walked into his room, yes."
His jaw tightened.
"He was dying.
He was on medication.
He wasn't—" He stopped himself.
Started again.
"I'm not saying you forced anything.
I'm saying he was vulnerable and the timing is very convenient."
I looked at him steadily.
"I understand why it looks that way."
"Do you." Not a question.
"Daniel, I didn't know about the house.
I didn't know about the estate.
I didn't know about you.
When your father proposed, I thought he was a dying man who wanted to spend his last weeks with someone he'd loved when he was young.
That's all I understood it to be."
"And the money?"
"I don't need it."
He made a short sound.
"Everyone needs one point four million dollars."
"I have a pension.
I have this apartment.
I have enough." I kept my voice even.
"I'm not asking you to believe me today.
I'm asking you to sit down."
He didn't sit.
But he unbuttoned his coat.
"He never talked about you," Daniel said.
"Not once.
My whole life, not once.
And then he's dying and suddenly you appear and he marries you and leaves you everything." His voice was controlled but something underneath it was not.
"I want to know what you were to him."
"I was his first love," I said.
"When we were seventeen.
I left for college.
He stayed.
We never saw each other again until I walked into his hospital room."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he reached into his coat and pulled out an envelope.
He held it out.
I recognized the handwriting immediately.
"He left me a letter too," Daniel said.
"Mr.
Hale gave it to me this morning.
I've read it four times." His hand was steady but his voice had shifted slightly.
"He says I should trust you.
He says—" He stopped.
Swallowed.
"He says you're the reason he bought the house on Maple Street.
He says he wants us to know each other."
I took the envelope carefully.
"He says a lot of things," Daniel continued, "about what he hoped would happen.
About what he believed." A pause.
"What he doesn't explain is why he never told me you existed.
Fifty-two years.
He never once mentioned your name."
I looked down at the envelope in my hands.
"Eleanor," he said, and it was the first time he'd used my name.
It came out differently than he intended, I think.
Rougher.
"Did he ever try to find you?
In all those years?"
I looked up.
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"I never tried to find him."
Something moved across his face.
Not softness exactly.
But the first crack in the flatness.
"Mr.
Hale said there's a letter," he said.
"A second one.
That I only get after we've met."
"I know."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know that either."
He stared at me.
Then he looked around the room again — differently this time.
Not cataloguing.
Something closer to searching.
"He kept that house for fifty-four years," Daniel said quietly.
"I used to ask him why he never sold it.
He always said it wasn't the right time." A beat.
"I thought he was just sentimental about the neighborhood."
He finally sat down.
On the edge of the armchair, coat still on, hands on his knees.
"Tell me about him," he said.
"The man you knew when you were seventeen."
May you like
I sat across from him.
And I began.
