The bell above Millie’s Corner Café kept trembling after Graham Westlake entered.
Rain darkened the shoulders of his expensive coat.
Water ran from his hair, but he did not seem to notice.
He stood just inside the doorway with my cream envelope in one hand and stared at Poppy as though the room had fallen away around her.
Poppy stared back from her high chair.
She had stopped crushing the sugar packet.
Her small fingers rested against the paper, perfectly still.
The woman in the booth who had warned me about Graham’s lawyers lowered her coffee cup without taking a sip.
Graham’s eyes moved from Poppy to me.
“Elena.”
He said my name the way a person speaks after surfacing from deep water.
I reached behind the counter and lifted Poppy into my arms.
“You found the letter.”
His gaze dropped to the envelope.
“It was in a sealed evidence box.”
“Did you read it?”
“No.”
The answer surprised me.
Graham stepped closer, but I moved Poppy higher against my chest.
He noticed.
His face tightened, and he stopped several feet away.
“I came as soon as they showed it to me,” he said.
“The seal is still yours.
I thought you should decide whether I had the right to open it.”
For fifteen months, I had imagined Graham reading that letter and choosing silence.
I had pictured him handing it to an assistant, throwing it away, or placing it beneath a stack of contracts until my fear and our child became another task he never intended to finish.
Now the envelope was unbroken.
The truth should have comforted me.
Instead, it opened a different wound.
“Someone kept it from you.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
His jaw shifted.
“I’m trying to confirm that.”
The woman in the booth leaned toward her friend.
Graham looked in her direction, and both women suddenly became fascinated by the table.
I untied my apron with one hand.
“Millie, I need to go.”
My employer, who had been standing beside the kitchen window with a plate in her hands, nodded immediately.
“Take all the time you need.”
It was the first public kindness anyone in Maple Ridge had offered me without attaching a question.
Raymond arrived as I stepped outside.
He had seen the black car and hurried from the hardware store across the street.
He stopped when he recognized Graham.
For a moment, neither man spoke.
Raymond looked at the envelope, then at Poppy.
“So it was delivered.”
Graham faced him.
“You knew about it?”
“I drove her to the post office.”
“Then why didn’t anyone call me?”
Raymond’s expression hardened.
“She did more than call.
She trusted you.”
Graham accepted the blow without defending himself.
He asked whether we could speak somewhere private.
