Chapter 5: What the Phone Call Was For
She was.
Dolores heard it from the hallway — the woman's voice, low and rapid, the particular cadence of someone giving instructions rather than asking for help.
The sitting room door was not fully closed.
Whether that was carelessness or intention, Dolores couldn't say.
She stood in the hallway with a stack of folded dish towels she didn't need to move, and she listened.
"— it's nothing yet, but he's asking questions and I need you to be ready.
If he calls you, you say what we discussed.
You were there.
You saw how the child behaves.
You back me up, or this falls apart for both of us."
A pause.
The other voice, too faint to make out.
"I don't care what you're comfortable with.
I'm telling you what needs to happen."
Another pause.
"She's six years old, Martin.
No one is going to take her word over mine."
Dolores set the dish towels down on the hallway table.
She walked back to the kitchen, where Thomas was still sitting beside Lily, and she said, very quietly, "There's something you should know."
Thomas looked up.
"She's on the phone.
In the sitting room.
She's asking someone named Martin to say he was a witness.
To say he saw how Lily behaves."
Thomas was still for a moment.
Then he said, "Martin Hale."
"I don't know his last name."
"I do." He stood up.
"He's her brother."
Dolores watched his face.
"What do you want to do?"
"I want you to stay with Lily." He moved toward the hallway.
Then he stopped.
"Dolores.
That paper — do you have it?"
"You gave it back to me in the sitting room.
It's in my pocket."
"Don't let it out of your hands."
He went down the hallway.
Dolores heard the sitting room door open without a knock.
She heard the woman's voice cut off mid-sentence.
Then Thomas's voice, level and clear: "Put the phone down."
A beat of silence.
"I said put it down."
The sound of a phone being set on a hard surface.
Dolores looked at Lily, who was sitting very still at the kitchen table, her hands flat on the wood, listening with her whole body.
"It's all right," Dolores said.
"I know," Lily said.
But she didn't look away from the hallway.
In the sitting room, Thomas said: "I heard you.
From the hallway.
I expect Martin did too, so there's no point in telling me I misunderstood."
"You were eavesdropping—"
"I was walking to my own sitting room." His voice didn't rise.
"You were asking your brother to lie about my daughter."
"I was asking him to give context—"
"You used the words 'no one is going to take her word over mine.' About a six-year-old child.
In my house."
Silence.
"I want you to listen to me carefully," Thomas said.
"Because I'm going to say this once, and I'm not going to repeat it, and I need you to understand that I mean every word."
Dolores moved slightly closer to the kitchen doorway.
Not to interfere.
Just to hear.
"I read what she wrote," Thomas said.
"I heard what she told me.
And I just heard what you said on that phone.
There is nothing you can tell me now that changes any of those three things.
Do you understand?"
The woman's voice came back — quieter now, and with a different quality.
The warmth was gone entirely.
What was left was something harder.
"You're making a mistake," she said.
"You don't know what that child is like when you're not here.
You don't see it.
You're away for weeks at a time and you come home and she performs for you and you believe every word she says because you feel guilty about being gone.
She knows exactly what she's doing."
"She's six."
"She's manipulative.
She has been since the beginning.
She doesn't want me here.
She never did.
Everything she told you is a story she constructed to get rid of me."
The silence that followed was long enough that Dolores held her breath.
Then Thomas said: "She wrote those seven words and hid them under a floorboard in her room.
She didn't show them to me.
She didn't show them to anyone.
She hid them.
Because she was afraid of what would happen if you found them."
No answer.
"A child who is manipulating someone," he said, "doesn't hide the evidence.
She shows it."
Another silence.
Then, very quietly, the woman said: "What are you going to do?"
And Thomas said: "I'm going to ask you to leave this house tonight.
And then tomorrow, I'm going to make some calls of my own."
The sound that followed was not crying.
It was something colder — a sharp exhale, the sound of someone recalculating.
"You'll regret this," she said.
"Perhaps," Thomas said.
"But not for the reasons you think."
Dolores stepped back from the doorway and returned to the table.
She sat down across from Lily and folded her hands.
Lily was watching her.
"Is he making her go?" the girl asked.
"Yes."
Lily looked down at the table.
Her finger traced a small invisible shape on the wood — a circle, or maybe a letter.
"She'll come back," she said.
"She always says she will."
Dolores looked at the child's face — the careful, watchful steadiness of it, the absence of relief that should have been there.
"Not this time," Dolores said.
Lily looked up.
"How do you know?"
"Because this time," Dolores said, "your papa knows what's on that paper."
Lily held her gaze for a long moment.
Then she went back to tracing her invisible shape on the table.
But her shoulders, Dolores noticed, had dropped half an inch.
May you like
Just half an inch.
But it was there.
