The Same Hand

Odette knew where to look. Her mother still had two of the birthday cards, kept in a memory box in the attic that hadn't been opened in a decade. Odette laid them beside a photocopy of the groundskeeper's ledger entry — Gerald's cramped, forceful handwriting, familiar from decades of signed report cards and disapproving notes left on her childhood homework.

The G in Love, Aunt Celeste leaned the same sharp way as the G in G's orders.

The looped, hurried e matched too. And the way both writers crossed their t's high and fast, like they resented the pause.

It wasn't a court-admissible match. It didn't have to be. Odette had seen her grandfather's handwriting her entire life. She knew it the way she knew his voice.

He had written those cards. Year after year, a dead girl's love for a niece who never stopped believing she was alive somewhere, happy somewhere — all of it manufactured by the one man who knew, better than anyone alive, exactly why she'd never write again.

Odette drove to the nursing wing that evening with the photocopies still in her bag, determined to sit at Abel's side until he woke, until he finished the sentence the alarm had cut off. Determined to ask him, finally, what happened after they moved her.

She let herself into the dim room without knocking.

Gerald was already there.

He stood over the bed, close, one hand resting near the tangle of tubing at Abel's collar, his head bent low as if listening for breath — or making sure there wasn't any left to hear. He was speaking, barely audible, a low murmur she couldn't make out except for three words that stopped her cold in the doorway.

"—never should've spoken."

Abel's monitor blipped, steady but faint. Gerald's hand hadn't moved from the tubing.

"Grandfather," Odette said sharply. "Step away from him."

Gerald turned, and in the low light his face wasn't guilty.

It was calm. Calculating. The face of a man who had already decided, a long time ago, exactly how far he was willing to go to keep a garden's secrets buried.