Chapter 14
For the next hour, I sit on the bed with a sight line to the house and try in every way I can to make sense of my conversation with Henry.
What does he want with my email? Does it have to do with money?
Accessing my bank accounts? It’s the only scenario I can make fit.
If Henry needs money, he would never be able to say so outright, especially not to me.
And what about his reaction, when I asked him about the voice I heard last night? I could not tell if I had imagined it, but his blithe insistence that I did has convinced me of the opposite.
I’m just about to risk a trip to the bathroom when the door to the main house bangs open.
Henry bypasses the stone pathway to the cabin and heads straight for the dock.
I hurry to the front window to see him off like a girl in an old movie set during wartimes, hand to the glass, sorrow scoring my face.
Henry wears a light-colored baseball hat that is darkening by the second, and I look to the lake and see that it’s denting with a fast, light rain.
Henry pats himself down, checking to make sure he has everything he needs to blow up my life in the pockets of his old waxed chore coat.
There was a time he would drape that coat over my shoulders when I was not dressed warmly enough, but that time has long since passed.
I watch Henry untie the dock lines, toss them aside.
He steps inside the boat and pushes off the dock.
His wake wags like a tail as he motors away.
Only then do I retract my hand from the window and stare in a state of giddy delirium.
My palm is wet. Not condensation wet, but the kind that comes from a leak.