“Do you think Grace is mad?”
“At us?”
“For leaving.”
“She’ll be mad after she feels better.”
Annie considered this.
“That’s good.”
I understood what she meant.
If Grace had enough energy to be angry, then she was getting better.
Arthur returned holding two paper cups of water.
“Dr. Mercer says your sister has a respiratory infection and significant dehydration. They’re giving her fluids and medicine.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
He answered quickly enough that I believed him.
My shoulders loosened for the first time all day.
“Can we see her?”
“Soon.”
He sat in the chair across from us.
Without the mansion around him, Arthur looked smaller.
Older too.
He turned his wife’s ring slowly between his fingers.
“You really searched for that for seventeen years?” Annie asked.
Arthur nodded.
“My wife, Eleanor, lost it during a charity reception at the house. We had nearly forty people in the garden that evening. Landscapers dug around the roses the following week, but no one found it.”
