What Hope Heard Through the Door
Chapter 10 - What Hope Heard Through the Door
Losing the company should have devastated me.
Instead, I felt strangely light until I returned to the hospital and discovered Hope was gone.
Claire was asleep.
Walter had stepped downstairs for coffee.
A nurse remembered seeing Hope near the elevators, but no one had stopped her because she was wearing the clean coat I had bought that morning.
On Claire’s bedside table lay the newspaper containing my photograph.
Someone had circled the estimated value of my company.
Beneath it, Hope had written in pencil:
I’m sorry I made you lose everything.
We searched every floor.
Officer Ruiz issued an alert.
Walter blamed himself. Claire blamed Grant. I blamed the twenty seconds outside the boardroom when I had allowed Grant’s words to reach me.
A child who had been abandoned once could hear abandonment in every closed door.
I knew where she had gone.
The Madison Crown Café was nearly empty when we arrived.
Rain had begun falling across the sidewalk. The portrait was disappearing beneath the water.
Hope sat beside it, trying to protect the woman’s face with her coat.
Black chalk ran through her fingers.
I crouched beside her.
“I ruined it again,” she said.
“No.”
“The rain is washing her away.”
“Then we draw her somewhere the rain can’t reach.”
Hope shook her head.
“You lost your company because of me.”
“I lost a chair in a room filled with people who were afraid of the truth.”
“You were important.”
“I thought I was.”
She looked at my white blazer, now soaked and streaked with chalk.
“What are you now?”
I considered the question.
“I’m a woman trying not to leave.”
Hope’s mouth trembled.
“Aunt Claire always came back.”
“I know.”
“You might get tired.”
“I might.”
“You might get mad.”
“I will.”
“You might wish I wasn’t here.”
“Never.”
The word came from somewhere deeper than certainty.
Hope finally let me wrap the coat around her shoulders.
Officer Ruiz approached from across the street, relief visible on his face.
Then his radio sounded.
His expression changed.
He stepped close and lowered his voice.
“Claire is no longer at the hospital.”
I stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“She was transferred twenty minutes ago.”
“Transferred where?”
May you like
“No one knows.”
The authorization carried my mother’s signature.
