Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 111 - Chapitre 120

Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Three: The FoundingChapter Twenty-One: The Day AfterThe morning after the ceremony, Lucas threw a bowl of porridge at the wall.It was not malice. It was, as far as Lila could tell, an experiment about the properties of porridge and gravity, and the results were extremely satisfying to him and less satisfying to the wall. Rosa handled it with the unbothered efficiency of a woman who had cleaned worse things off worse surfaces. Noah watched the entire event with the expression of a man observing a colleague make a serious professional error and choosing not to comment.Lila stood in the kitchen with her coffee and watched all of it and thought: this is what the day after looks like.Not trumpets. Porridge on a wall.Half the family had already left — flights out of JFK, the practical scattering of forty people back to ten countries. Keiko had gone at six with her children and a promise to call on Sunday. The Vermont family had gone at seven with

Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Three: The FoundingChapter Twenty-Three: She Doesn't Look Like She's Waiting AnymoreThey came on Friday.Mia got out of the car first. Nine years old, a backpack with a frog on it, hair escaping from a ponytail that had lost the argument somewhere over Nebraska. She looked at the house. She looked at the ocean. She looked at Lila."Is this where she is?" she said."Yes," Lila said."Can I see her now or do we have to do the polite part first?"Behind her, Sarah put a hand over her own face. "Mia.""It's a fair question," Lila said. "We can do the polite part later. Come on."She took them upstairs. Past Elliot's drawing, which Mia stopped at for a full ten seconds and studied with real attention, and past the boys' door, which was open, and into the nursery.The shelf was where it always was. Henry the rabbit. Thomas's wooden horse. And in the middle, in the frame Lila had bought for it, Agnes.Mia went very still.She walked up to the shelf sl

Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Three: The FoundingChapter Twenty-Five: ClaraThe Hartley line came down to one person.Tyler found her in a day and a half. Clara Hartley-Brennan, thirty-nine, Saratoga Springs, New York. A fourth-grade teacher. Divorced, no children, lived in the house her grandmother had left her. Firstborn daughter of the Hartley line, and the only living one."There's something else," Tyler said, when he handed the file over. "She contacted us."Lila looked up. "What?""Six months ago. The Foundation's public inquiry form." He turned his screen around. "She wrote in about a genealogy question. Two paragraphs. Very polite. She said her grandmother had left her some family papers referencing a connection to a New England family and she wondered if the Foundation's historical work overlapped." He paused. "It got sorted into the general genealogy queue. Someone sent her a form response with a list of public archives." A pause. "Nobody followed up."Kane read th

Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Three: The FoundingChapter Twenty-Seven: The Letter to MarcusThe letter came in the last week of November.Eight pages, in James's handwriting, on the lined paper the facility sold in its commissary. It was not addressed to Lila.It said, on the envelope, in careful capitals: FOR MARCUS WEBB.Marcus read it in the study at the estate with the door shut. He was in there for fifty minutes. When he came out his eyes were red and he did not pretend they weren't."He knew," he said.Lila waited."About Thomas. About Agnes." Marcus sat down at the kitchen table and put the pages in front of him and flattened them with both hands. "He didn't just read the covenant's surface. He read all of it. He found the Agnes connection in 1987, the same year he found the document." He looked up. "He's known for thirty-nine years that Thomas was Agnes's son.""Then why—""Because of me," Marcus said. "That's what the letter is about." He turned a page. "He says: wh

Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Three: The FoundingChapter Twenty-Nine: What Her Father WroteElena found it in February, in a storage unit in Lisbon she had been paying for since 2003 and had never fully emptied.She called at eleven at night, which Elena never did."I have found something," she said. "I am going to describe it to you and then I am going to photograph it and then I am going to sit down, because I have had a shock.""Mother—""There is a box of your father's papers," Elena said. "Professional things. Journals, files. Underneath them there is an envelope." A pause. "It is not addressed to me."Lila's hand went still on the counter."It says," Elena said, and her voice did something, "Lila. When she is ready."Neither of them spoke."He gave it to me in 2006," Elena said. "A year before he died. He put it in my hands and he said: keep this. Give it to her when she has found the family." A pause. "I said to him, she is not lost, she is not going anywhere. And he