Chapter 43: Sloane Hale
1035 Words
NORA POV
“I’m looking for my son”
I had been crossing the front hall when the knock came. Not Conrad’s territory this hour, he was in the west wing, and the gate wolf had apparently already let her through to the front door which meant someone had cleared her.
I opened it.
The woman on the step was in her fifties. Dark coat, buttoned all the way up, a bag over one shoulder that said she had travelled a distance to get here. Her hair was going grey at the front in a way she hadn’t tried to hide. She was watching me with careful eyes, the kind that had been careful for so long the watchfulness had become just the natural way her face sat.
“Marcus Hale” she said. “He is here?”
“He is” I said. “And you are?”
“Sloane.” She held my eyes steadily. “Sloane Hale. His mother.”
I looked at her for just a second.
“Come in” I said.
I put her in the east sitting room, which was becoming the room where things happened now, and I told her I would go find Marcus. She sat down without fidgeting and folded her hands in her lap and looked at the window and everything about her said she had done a lot of waiting in her life and was good at it.
I went to find Marcus.
On the way I tried to remember where I had heard the name. Sloane Hale. Roy had mentioned it. That conversation in my room when he was laying out pieces. He had said Marcus’s estranged mother. He had said she knew where Dana had been. He had said she helped Marcus hide her.
I stopped walking for half a second.
She helped Marcus hide her.
This woman sitting in the east sitting room with her hands folded in her lap had known where Dana was for five years.
I kept walking.
Marcus was in the corridor near the east wing. He had been doing a lot of corridor sitting lately. He looked up when he heard me coming and started to say something and I said, “Your mother is here.”
He went very still. “What?”
“East sitting room. She arrived at the front door ten minutes ago.”
“She came here?” He stood up from the wall. “She actually came here?”
“Yes.”
He ran one hand through his hair and looked at the floor for a second. The look of someone who had not prepared for this specific thing and was trying to fast-assemble a response to it.
“How did she look?” he said.
“Contained” I said. “Watchful. She did not look alarmed.” I kept my eyes on him. “She asked for you by name and introduced herself calmly. She sat down and waited without asking questions.” I paused. “She has been here before.”
He looked up at me.
“She knows this house” I said. “Not perfectly. But enough. The way she looked at the room when she came in.” I kept my voice even. “How long has she been in contact with you about Dana?”
Marcus was quiet.
“Marcus.”
“From the beginning” he said. “She knew before I did. She was the one who told me Dana had reached out to her first. Before she messaged me.” He pressed his lips together. “My mother has known where Dana was from maybe the first two months after the wedding.”
I stared at him.
“She helped you” I said. “Practically. Finding places for Dana to stay. Money. Contacts.”
“Yes.”
“For five years.”
“Yes.”
I looked at the corridor ceiling briefly and breathed once. Then I looked back at him.
“Go see your mother” I said. “I will give you privacy.”
He moved past me toward the east sitting room. I followed at a distance and stopped at the door and watched through the gap for just a moment before I stepped back.
Sloane had stood up when Marcus came in. She looked at him the way mothers looked at sons when they had been worried about them for a long time and were now seeing for themselves that the son was still standing. Checking him over. His face. His posture. His eyes.
Then she said something low and quiet that I could not hear and Marcus said something back and she put her hand on his arm briefly.
Not a hug. Not an emotional reunion. Just that hand on his arm for two seconds. Practical. Steady. The gesture of someone whose love was real but had always been expressed through doing rather than showing.
She came here for him. That part was real.
But I was standing in the corridor with the sound of Sloane’s careful voice coming through the door and I could not stop the feeling.
She had not come only for Marcus.
Something had moved. Some event, some shift in this whole situation, and she had decided that now was the moment to be here physically instead of at a distance. She had driven here, come through the gate, sat in that room and waited. Patient. Like a person who had been watching a clock and the alarm had finally gone off.
What was the alarm?
The delegation leaving? Warren’s letter? The pack starting to talk?
Or something else. Something she could feel from wherever she had been the same way Judith had felt the suppression cracking from the city.
I stepped back from the door. The corridor was empty either way. Just me and the sound of voices I could not fully hear.
I pressed my hand against my chest.
The pressure pushed back. Higher than this morning.
Tonight.
The window was still open.
I needed it to still be open.
- Writer
