At the end of the corridor she turned around.
“She’ll leave, you know,” she said.
“In nine years she’ll be gone and you’ll be fifty-one and alone in that house with a woman who’s been dead for fifteen years, and you’ll think about today.”
I have thought about that quite a lot, actually, because it is the only genuinely frightening thing anybody said to me that day, and because it may well be true.
“She doesn’t have to stay forever to be worth protecting this afternoon,” I said.
And that was the last thing I ever said to Pamela Gable.
Part Ten: That Night
We got home at six-forty.
Hannah went upstairs and came back down eleven minutes later in sweatpants and one of my old PT shirts that comes to her knees, and she did not say anything about the dress, and I found it three days later on a hanger on the back of her door where she had hung it up carefully.
Samantha made grilled cheese, because that is what my sister does in a crisis, and we ate it in front of a nature documentary that none of us watched.
Hannah fell asleep on the sofa at about nine.
I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and Samantha brought me a coffee and sat in the chair, and neither of us said anything for a while.
“How long?” she said eventually.
“I don’t know.”
“Chris.”
“I genuinely don’t know, Sam.
I’m going to find out and I don’t want to find out tonight.”
She let that sit.
Then she said the thing that she had clearly been carrying for a while, and which she had chosen — deliberately, I now understand — not to say for eighteen months.
“I didn’t like her.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.
You think I didn’t like her the way sisters don’t like girlfriends.” Samantha put her cup down.
“In January, at your birthday, Hannah asked me if she could come and live with me sometimes.
