“Last week you mentioned that lately Elizabeth has told you things she’d”—he flipped back through his notebook—“kept secret, but not on purpose.”
“Yes, it’s been great.”
“I’m curious,” Dr. Nissensen said. “Is there any particular thing you’d most like Elizabeth to tell you?”
“If it’s a secret, how would I even know to ask about it?”
“I was thinking of the phrase ‘a painful secret.’”
“There is one thing. It’s something lately I sense she wants to tell me.”
“And now you in fact want to hear it?”
“I’m sort of afraid to hear it, actually.”
He closed his notebook and stared at the cover, then looked up at me.
“Is that one thing how she was murdered, Sam? What really happened. Not in the courtroom, what the bellman Alfonse Padgett described as having occurred, but the incident from Elizabeth’s point of view. Her own account of it. Which would naturally be the truth to you—and should be. Are you afraid, as you say, because you might then experience what she felt at that moment? And yet you want to feel everything she felt. Because you loved her so deeply.”
“Not past tense, please. Love, not loved.”
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About the Author
HOWARD NORMAN is a winner of the Lannan Literary Award in fiction and a two-time National Book Award nominee. He is also the author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, What Is Left the Daughter, and Next Life Might Be Kinder. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, DC.
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My Darling Detective Page 23