Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 361 - Chapitre 370

Harrison’s POVI was in the parking lot of the holding facility at quarter past eleven in the morning, because Greenwood had told me to be there early, and I’d overshot by forty-five minutes. I sat in the car. I didn’t turn the radio on.Thomas came out at 11:42.He was wearing the suit he’d gone in, which didn’t fit him anymore because he’d lost fifteen pounds in four months. The jacket hung wrong on his shoulders. He was carrying a paper bag in one hand, and he was walking slowly.I got out of the car. He saw me. He stopped for a second at the curb, and then he kept walking.“You didn’t have to come,” he said when he reached me. “I could have taken a cab, Harrison.”“I came, Thomas.”He looked at the car, then at me, and then he set the paper bag on the hood and put his hand flat on the roof for a second. I didn’t say anything. He picked the bag up. He got in.The apartment was on the south side in a three-story brick building on a street with too many telephone wires. Unit 1B was o

Estelle’s POVHarrison put sixty-three nails in the back fence before he ran out of paper lanterns. Then he drove to the hardware shop and bought a second box of lanterns and a second strip of nails.He put eighteen more in before I went out to the garden and told him, flatly, that it was enough.“There are children coming, Harrison,” I said. “Not a navy.”“I wanted it to look nice.”“Harrison. Step away from the fence.”He stepped away from the fence. He looked at it for a moment—the eighty-one nails, the lanterns strung in tight rows like a military operation—and I could see on his face the particular expression of a man who knows he has overdone something and is not yet willing to admit it.The cake was from the bakery on Ashland.It had ten candles on it, and Lucas’s name on one side, and Chloe’s name on the other, and a small wooden horse figurine on top that Chloe had picked out herself at a craft shop three weeks earlier because she had decided that horses were her personality

Estelle’s POVChloe was awake at a quarter past five the next morning.I know this because I heard her. I had been awake since a little after four—lying in the dark beside Harrison’s sleeping body, listening to the house. I had tracked her bedroom light coming on through the crack under her door.I did not go to her. She had asked to talk in the morning, and I was going to let her come down when she was ready.At twenty to six I went downstairs. I made coffee. I didn’t drink it.I sat on the stool at the counter with my hands around the mug, and I waited.She came down at a quarter to six.She walked in slowly, one hand trailing along the worktop. Her eyes were red, but she had not been crying. I knew the difference. Chloe did not cry when she was building up to something. She cried afterwards—privately, furiously, in her room with the door shut.The redness was exhaustion, not tears.She sat on the stool across from me.“Mum. I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to tell me

Harrison’s POVI hadn’t opened the glove compartment in fourteen months.I knew the gun was in there the way you know an unpaid bill is sitting on your desk. You don’t look at it. You don’t think about it directly. But it sits there, and the longer you leave it, the larger it gets, until the thing you’re avoiding has become the biggest object in the room.On a Tuesday morning in August I drove past the exit for the office and kept going south. I didn’t decide to do it. I just didn’t take the exit.I passed two strip malls, a car wash, a church with a sign that said GOD IS WATCHING AND ALSO WE HAVE BINGO WEDNESDAYS, and a long stretch of scrub grass and heat shimmer before I found Talbot Brothers Salvage.The man at the gate was in his sixties. He had a clipboard and a sun-bleached cap and he looked at me the way people look at men in dress shirts who pull into scrapyards at nine in the morning.“Help you?”“I want to have a car crushed.”He looked at my car. He looked at me.“That car

Estelle’s POVI came downstairs in Harrison’s old t-shirt and sleep shorts with my hair still in last night’s braid, expecting coffee and toast and the Sunday paper.The kitchen was different.Paper streamers hung from the light fixture above the island—uneven, drooping badly on the left side, clearly taped there by someone shorter than four and a half feet. A single bouquet of peonies sat on the counter in a water glass, because nobody had thought about a vase.Two strings of fairy lights were wound around the curtain rod above the sink, plugged in and glowing faintly even though the morning sun was already pouring through the window and making them almost invisible.Chloe was standing at the island holding a piece of cream cardstock with something written on it in green marker. She was wearing her school uniform on a Sunday for no apparent reason.Harrison was on the other side of the kitchen, near the stove, in jeans and the navy sweater I’d bought him for Christmas. His hands were