Chapter 2 - THE GHOST AT THE DOOR
The drive back to Fredericksburg from the Richmond hospital took exactly one hour and thirty-four minutes. I drove in complete silence, the radio off, my hands gripping the steering wheel while my granddaughter slept in the car seat behind me.
When we finally arrived at my small, single-story house, I carried her inside, still wrapped in that pale yellow blanket I had knitted. I set her gently into the bassinet I had hurriedly purchased from a neighbor the day before. She didn't wake. She just breathed, tiny and perfect, her single arm tucked against her chest.
It was only when I reached into the diaper bag Thomas had shoved into my hands at the hospital that I found it.
Tucked beneath a stack of newborn diapers was a thick, ivory envelope.
My name, Eleanor, was written across the front in Rebecca’s shaky handwriting. The flap was sealed shut with a heavy strip of clear tape.
I sat at my kitchen table, holding the envelope under the harsh overhead light. My thumb traced the edge of the paper. Everything in me wanted to tear it open. I wanted to know what kind of mother walks away from her child and leaves nothing but a piece of paper. But as I looked at the sleeping infant in the next room, a fierce, protective instinct settled over me.
Whatever was in that letter belonged to the past. My granddaughter was my future.
I walked into my bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of my heavy oak dresser, and slid the envelope beneath a stack of winter sweaters.
Sixteen years later.
The rhythmic, metallic ticking of a dozen antique clocks filled the living room.
Maya sat at my kitchen table, a jeweler’s loupe pressed to her right eye. At sixteen, she had inherited her mother’s dark blond hair and her father’s intense, focused scowl. But everything else about her was entirely her own.
Her left shoulder, which ended just below the joint, was tucked comfortably against her side as her right hand moved with astonishing speed and precision. She was holding a pair of needle-nosed tweezers, carefully setting a microscopic brass gear into the open back of a 1920s pocket watch.
“You’re breathing too loud, Gran,” she muttered, not looking up.
I smiled, turning a page of my library book. “I wasn’t aware my respiratory system was a nuisance to your genius.”
“It throws off the timing,” she said, finally pulling the loupe from her eye and grinning at me. She snapped the back of the pocket watch closed. The ticking in the room grew slightly louder. “Done. Mr. Henderson is going to owe me fifty bucks for this one. The mainspring was entirely stripped.”
“You’re undercharging him,” I said, walking over to pour us both a glass of iced tea. “You’re the only person in three counties who can fix these things with one hand.”
“I’m the only person who can fix them, period,” she corrected smoothly, taking the glass.
Before she could take a sip, a heavy, sharp knock rattled the front door.
We both froze. We rarely had visitors on a Tuesday evening, and never anyone who knocked with that kind of frantic urgency.
Maya set her glass down. “Expecting a package?”
“No,” I said, wiping my hands on a dish towel.
I walked to the front door and peered through the peephole. The breath completely vanished from my lungs.
Standing on my porch, soaked from the light evening rain, was a man I had not seen in sixteen years.
His hair was entirely gray now, his face lined with deep, exhausted creases, but the nervous, shifting posture was exactly the same.
It was Thomas.
I opened the door just a few inches, keeping the chain engaged.
“Mom,” he breathed, stepping closer to the crack. He looked terrified.
“Thomas,” I said, keeping my voice dangerously flat. “You are sixteen years too late for a visit.”
“Please,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder at the empty street. “I didn’t come to make amends. I came to warn you.”
I frowned, my grip tightening on the edge of the door. “Warn me about what?”
He looked back at me, his eyes wide and bloodshot.
“Rebecca is back. She’s in Fredericksburg. And she’s looking for the girl.”
I felt a cold spike of dread, but before I could process it, Thomas’s eyes shifted past me, looking into the hallway. All the color drained from his already pale face.
He wasn't looking at Maya.
Through the crack in the door, his line of sight landed directly on the small entry table in the hall. Sitting on that table, propped up against a vase of dried flowers, was the thick, ivory envelope. I had pulled it out of my drawer this morning, intending to finally give it to Maya for her sixteenth birthday tomorrow.
May you like
Thomas stared at the sealed envelope, his jaw trembling.
“You didn’t open it,” he choked out, his voice dropping to a horrified whisper. “She told me she burned it.”
