“Getting to know you, darling.” He smiled, and for the first time that smile looked like something he was holding up with both hands.
I tried to relax. I cut a potato in half and then in half again.
Then he asked, in a casual voice that didn’t fit the question, “Did your mother ever live in Chicago? Around 1965?”
My fork stopped halfway to my mouth.
“How do you know that?”
“Lucky guess.” He reached for his wine.
“Arthur, that is a very specific guess.”
“You said your family moved around.”
“I never said Chicago.”
The color left his face a little at a time. He opened his mouth and the telephone rang in the hall.
He looked at the screen, then at me. “Excuse me. I have to take this.”
He left the room. A door closed somewhere deep in the house.
I sat there with a cooling dinner and a heartbeat I could feel in my teeth. Three weeks of kindness rearranged themselves in my mind. The photographs. The questions. The way he’d watched me on the third date, waiting for me to say something I hadn’t said.
Had our meeting been an accident at all?
Hurried footsteps came down the hall. Helen slipped into the dining room with her hands empty and her eyes red.
“Ma’am, you need to leave,” she whispered. “Before he comes back.”
I stood so fast my chair scraped. “What on earth is going on?”
“Please.” She glanced over her shoulder. “There’s something you ought to know.”
“Then tell me.”
She took my hand, hers cold and shaking, and tugged me toward the hall. “Arthur has been looking for you for years.”
“Why would he…”
“Helen.”
Arthur stood at the end of the hallway with his phone dark in his hand. Helen didn’t let go of me.
“I’m telling her,” she said.
“Not like this.”
“Then how? You’ve had three dates and a whole dinner.”
I looked from one to the other. My hand was starting to ache in Helen’s grip. “Somebody had better explain this to me. Right now.”
Arthur came forward slowly, as one approaches a skittish horse. “Holly, please don’t be frightened.”
“That is not a reassuring thing to say.”
He stopped. Helen turned to me and her voice steadied. “There’s something in his study you need to see.”
“Holly, wait,” Arthur said. “Please, let me…”
“No,” I said. It came out calmer than I felt. “Show me.”
