Chapter 5
Daniel showed me the message.
Bianca had not named the thing she took. She had written that Lily would have wanted him to hear her side before involving lawyers and that she would meet him at a café near the train station.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Nora should know.”
“She said alone.”
I looked at him until he put the phone down.
“I won’t hide it from Nora,” he said. “I meant I need to hear what she says.”
He called her. Nora asked him to save the message and arrange a meeting where she could be nearby. Daniel agreed, though I could hear the strain in his voice.
While he spoke, I checked Lily’s blue box with Ella’s permission. The photographs and cards I remembered were there. Near the bottom, beneath a handkerchief Lily had embroidered, was a pale rectangle where something had rested for years.
I had seen a small green notebook there before. Lily used it to record what she planted in the orchard, but she also wrote reminders about the children. Once, when I was worried about Oliver’s cough, she had opened it to show me the name of his doctor.
The notebook was gone.
“I think I know what Bianca took,” I told Daniel.
His face tightened.
At the café, Nora sat at a table across the room while Daniel and I waited together. Bianca came in wearing a gray coat and no jewelry except her wedding ring. She saw me and stopped.
“You brought Martha.”
“She knows Lily’s notebook is missing,” Daniel said.
Bianca sat down slowly.
“I found it in the desk. I wanted to understand why Martha kept telling the children I might send her away.”
“What does that have to do with Lily’s notebook?” I asked.
Bianca looked at Daniel.
“You see how she speaks to me?”
He did not answer.
For a moment I could see how easily the old conversation might have resumed. She would say she was hurt. He would try to soothe her. I would become the interruption.
Daniel rested both hands on the table.
“Give me the notebook.”
Bianca took it from her bag.
I recognized Lily’s green cover, bent at one corner. Daniel reached for it, but Bianca kept a hand over it.
“She wrote about you,” Bianca said.
His expression changed.
“She was angry near the end,” Bianca continued. “You worked too much. She worried you would leave everything to other people if she died.”
Daniel withdrew his hand.
I remembered that time. Lily had been ill, and Daniel had filled his days with work because he could not bear watching her weaken. They had argued. They had also held each other every night.
“She was allowed to be angry,” I said. “Give him the book.”
Bianca slid it across the table.
Daniel opened it. There were dates, notes about apple trees, Ella’s first attempt to write her name, and the words Lily had planned to put on Oliver’s second birthday cake.
A few pages later, he found the entry Bianca meant.
He read silently. His eyes filled.
“What does it say?” I asked.
He turned the book so I could see.
Lily had written that she needed Daniel at home more often. She feared the children would learn to reach for him and find an empty chair. Beneath that, in darker ink, she had added a week later that he had taken leave from work and spent three mornings teaching Ella to ride her bicycle.
He touched the second entry.
“You left this out,” he said to Bianca.
“I hadn’t reached it.”
Nora joined us. She asked Bianca why she had taken the notebook and contacted a surveyor about trust property.
Bianca said the survey was an estimate, nothing more. She said she had borrowed the notebook because she felt shut out of Lily’s place in the family.
I could believe she felt shut out. I could not forget her shoe pushing my arm from the pool edge.
“Why did you tell Oliver he made up the playroom incident?” Daniel asked.
Bianca’s gaze dropped to the table.
“He was safe.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I needed a moment to calm down. He kept shouting.”
Oliver had told us the room was dark. I wondered how long he had waited for her to open the door.
Daniel closed the notebook.
“You need to stay at your sister’s for now,” he said. “The children are frightened of you.”
Bianca looked up sharply.
“Your children have Martha telling them to be frightened.”
“Ella saw what happened at the pool.”
“Ella saw part of an accident.”
Daniel flinched, but he held her gaze.
“Then we can let other people review it.”
Nora told Bianca she had made a report about the incident. I had asked her to help me do it that morning. Bianca’s hands curled around her cup.
“You’re ruining my life over a fall.”
“I nearly drowned,” I said.
She stood so quickly the chair scraped the floor. People turned to look.
For an instant, her face held the same anger I had seen beside the pool. Then she picked up her bag and walked out.
Daniel stayed seated, staring at Lily’s notebook.
“I kept hoping there was a way I’d misunderstood everything,” he said.
“You can still make things right for the children.”
“I know.”
He looked at me, and I saw how much work those two words would require.
At home, Ella asked whether Bianca had returned the book. I showed it to her.
She opened to a page where Lily had sketched the greenhouse and drawn two small figures beside it. One was Ella. The other was a baby in a stroller.
“She drew Oliver’s feet too big,” Ella said.
Oliver leaned over her shoulder.
“My feet are big now.”
They laughed. It was brief, but the sound reached every part of me.
That night Daniel knocked on my door.
He had found a message from the developer in an email account he shared with Bianca for household expenses. They had discussed the west garden for months. Bianca had told the developer Daniel would come around once he saw how much money was on offer.
“She was planning behind my back,” he said.
“Show Nora.”
“I already have.”
He hesitated at the door.
“She also asked the bank about borrowing against the house. They refused because of the trust.”
I thought of how angry Bianca had become when Ella said it was her mother’s house.
Daniel looked down at his hands.
“I let her believe the children were a problem to manage,” he said.
Before I could answer, Oliver called from upstairs.
His voice broke on the last word.
May you like
“Dad?”
Daniel ran.
