THE SIGNATURE
1116 Words
Chapter Ten
She gave him two weeks.
This was more than she would have given anyone else. Roland Hargrove was not anyone else — he was her oldest client, her most complicated client, and the man she had loved quietly and without resolution for the better part of twenty years. Two weeks felt proportionate. Two weeks felt like the kind of latitude you extended to someone when the reason you were extending it had nothing to do with business.
She called on the first of December.
Dorothy answered. Roland was improving but not yet well enough for calls. She would pass on the message.
Margaret wrote instead. A formal letter, brief, setting out the three documents requiring his signature and the dates by which they needed to be returned. She sent it recorded delivery. She noted the date in her file.
The reply came nine days later. Roland's handwriting — or what appeared to be Roland's handwriting — on his usual stationery. *Thank you for your patience. I will attend to the documents when I am able. R.H.*
Margaret read it twice. Set it down. Picked it up and read it again.
The handwriting was right. The phrasing was right. *I will attend to the documents when I am able* was exactly the kind of thing Roland said — patrician, slightly impatient, treating his own recovery as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a condition to be endured.
She should have been satisfied.
She put the letter in the file and went back to work.
---
She called again in the third week of December. Dorothy answered. Roland was resting but progressing well. He sent his regards.
Margaret noted this in her file too. *Sends regards.* Roland did not send regards. Roland acknowledged people when it suited him and ignored them when it didn't and the concept of sending regards was so fundamentally at odds with his character that she sat with her pen over the notepad for a moment after she hung up, looking at the words she had written.
She crossed them out. Wrote: *Dorothy reports improvement.*
---
Christmas came. She spent it with her sister in Edinburgh, as she always did — two days of her sister's husband's family and too much food and the particular exhaustion of performing contentment in a room full of people who assumed she had chosen to be alone. She had not chosen. She had simply arrived at fifty-eight having made certain decisions about certain things and this was where those decisions had landed her and she had long since stopped being surprised by it.
She thought about Roland on Christmas night. Not with grief — she was not ready to call it grief, grief required a loss to be confirmed and nothing had been confirmed — but with the low persistent unease of someone who has noticed something they cannot yet name.
She had known him for thirty years. She knew the texture of his correspondence, the rhythm of his communication, the precise weight of his silences. The letter had been right in every particular. And yet.
She poured herself another glass and watched her sister's husband fall asleep in front of the television and thought: *and yet.*
---
January. She sent the documents again with a covering letter, firmer this time, noting the deadlines that had now passed and the consequences of further delay. The reply came back within the week. Again Roland's handwriting. Again the right phrasing. A brief apology for the delay, an assurance that the documents would be returned by the end of the month.
They were not returned by the end of the month.
Margaret opened a new page in her file and wrote at the top: *Roland Hargrove — welfare concern.* She sat and looked at the words for a while. Then she wrote beneath them, in her small precise hand, everything she had noticed since November. The handwriting that was right but felt wrong. The regards he would never send. The illness with no diagnosis, no named doctor, no specific prognosis. Dorothy's voice on the phone — steady, careful, giving just enough and never more.
Dorothy's voice, she wrote, and stopped.
She thought about Dorothy standing in the kitchen doorway on the morning of the will reading, telling her Roland was resting and that he had asked not to be disturbed. She thought about the sixty seconds Dorothy had disappeared upstairs before returning to say his colour was better. She thought about the moment — the one moment too long — when their eyes had met across the kitchen and something had passed between them that Margaret had filed away without examining.
She examined it now.
She picked up the phone and called Clara.
---
Clara answered on the third ring. She sounded, Margaret thought, like someone who had been waiting for a call without knowing what call she was waiting for.
"I wanted to check in," Margaret said carefully. "About your father."
A pause. "Yes."
"Have you heard from him? Since November?"
Another pause. Longer. "Dorothy sends updates."
"Dorothy," Margaret said.
"Yes."
They were both quiet for a moment — two careful women, saying nothing, understanding each other perfectly.
"I think," Margaret said, "that I might drive up. In the next week or two. Just to check."
"Yes," Clara said. "I think that might be a good idea."
"I'll let you know when."
"Margaret." Clara's voice was different now. Lower. "When you go — will you tell me what you find?"
Margaret looked at the page in front of her. *Welfare concern.* Dorothy's voice.
"Yes," she said. "I will."
She hung up. She sat for a long time at her desk in the January dark, the file open in front of her, the unsigned documents in their folder, the letter in Roland's handwriting that was right in every particular and wrong in every way she couldn't prove.
Then she picked up her pen and began to plan what questions she would ask when she got there.
She had been a lawyer for thirty years. She knew how to find the thing a person was hiding — knew that it was rarely where they pointed you, rarely what they named, rarely the thing they were most careful about.
The thing they were hiding was always somewhere adjacent to the care. Just beside it. In the gap between what they said and what they did not say.
She thought about Dorothy. About the sixty seconds on the stairs. About sends regards.
She wrote one more line at the bottom of the page, underlined it, and closed the notebook.
Someone in that house is lying. And I think I know who.
- Writer
