“It... will... be ours?” she murmurs. The four words are stitched loosely together, but they still sound as beautiful as a song to me.
“Yes, love.”
“Here?”
“Right here. See, there’s the peach tree.” I point to the tree crudely drawn to the right of the floor plan of the two-bedroom, one-story cottage.
She looks up at me. “Our old house?”
“The fire took our old house, remember? It’s gone and we don’t have to go back there.”
“Father?”
I swallow back a bit of fear that she worries about him finding us, taking her back. Or hurting her for what she did to him.
“He’s gone, too.”
She blinks at me, long and slow, and her eyes are glistening when they open. She is feeling something deep and painful at these words of mine, and I realize I’ve been a fool to think she could cast away any longing for Martin’s affection as easily as I did. She doesn’t know all that he has done, all that he might have done if he had reached Belinda that morning instead of falling down the stairs.
I pull her close to me. “He would have loved you better if he had known how, poppet. You are easy to love. He didn’t know how. Some people just don’t know how to love. But you do. And I do. Belinda does. Elliot does. Sarah does. Your mother did. There are people who love you, Kat. Who will always love you. You and I can make a home for ourselves in the circle of that love if we want to. Shall we?”
She leans into me and nods. I will have to remind her of this when she thinks of Martin. I will have to remind myself that she likely will think of him, even though I will not.
•••
By the end of October, I’ve already saved a hundred dollars beyond what I have kept aside in a savings account at a bank in San Mateo. When the trust was set up years ago, it was to fund Candace’s lifestyle as a well-bred woman, but I spend very little of Kat’s money each week on our livelihood. Much of it goes into a savings account that will be hers when she’s older. I’m starting to think we will have our own little house in less than a year’s time.
In early November Elliot asks a friend of his to help clear a level spot by the peach tree so that when I am ready for the building to start, the location will be waiting.
It is when I am watching the two men work the ground to lay stakes that Belinda brings a letter to me that has come in the day’s mail. It is addressed to me and it’s from the San Francisco Police Department.
I open it hastily as Belinda stands over me. We are both surely hoping the police have decided my husband was likely a victim of the earthquake and fire seven months ago and that they regret to inform me that he has been declared dead. I know I’m wishing it.
But that is not what the letter says.
“They are asking me to please return to the station to supply them with additional information about my missing husband,” I say to Belinda.
“What additional information?” Belinda says, brows furrowed.
“I don’t know.”
“You already told them everything you know.”
“You mean I already told them everything I want them to know.”
Belinda takes the letter from me and reads it. “Can you decline to come?”
“I don’t think that would look good. I should want to be of assistance, shouldn’t I?”
She hands the letter back to me. “Maybe they are ready to declare him dead but they don’t want to say that in a letter. Maybe they think it would be kinder to tell you personally.”
“Maybe.”
But neither one of us truly thinks that’s what this request is about. It is something else. And it’s unsettling to us both.
The letter asks if I would be so kind as to come by the newly constructed station at eleven o’clock on Tuesday, the sixth of November, four days from now.
What can I do but go?
