After they left, I carried the signed original into the little back office that used to be Leif’s. I opened the top drawer of his desk and laid it inside.
There was already one thing in that drawer.
A plain white envelope. Across the front, in my handwriting, it said: Grady and Darcy — Christmas.
I had put it there in August.
I’m not going to tell you yet what was inside it. Because at the time, I wasn’t sure it would ever leave that drawer.
I closed the drawer. I sat for a moment in Leif’s desk chair, with his old calendar still on the wall turned to February 2024.
There was one word on the first page of that agreement that none of them read twice.
Keegan had read it once out loud. And then he’d decided it meant the same thing as a word he already knew.
It didn’t.
Hold on to that.
The weekend was long.
At six o’clock Saturday morning, I woke up to scales. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. And underneath them, that metronome.
Norine had moved it faster now. Ninety-two beats a minute. The ticking came straight through my bedroom wall, like somebody tapping on the plaster with a fingernail.
“For the children,” she said at breakfast. “They need to hear a steady beat.”
“What children?” I asked.
She smiled and didn’t answer.
She’d moved my coffee again. It was in the cabinet under the sink now, next to the dish soap.
On Sunday afternoon, she poked her head into the kitchen.
“Hillary, do you prefer a two o’clock or a three o’clock start for the fall recital?”
“I have no preference,” I said.
I genuinely had no idea what she was talking about.
On Monday, at 3:20 in the afternoon, I found out.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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