I could hear her breathing.
“Is it about Easter?” said Waverly Linwood.
Mr. Amory shut his eyes.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s about Easter.”
She did not say anything at all for almost a minute.
Then she said, in a voice I would not have recognized as the same voice: “Did he say anything about a baby?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because I’ve always wondered,” said Waverly. “I saw them at the supermarket, once, in the March before. Viola was wearing a very big coat. And I thought, she’s expecting. And I was too proud to go over.”
Nobody in that office could speak.
“Mrs. Linwood,” said Mr. Amory. “She’s alive. The baby lived. She’s seven years old, and she’s in my school. She’s sitting about three feet from me now.”
We heard the sound of a chair being pushed back.
“May I,” said the voice. It was very small. “May I come now?”
Chapter 5: Two Halves
I will say what I felt, in the half-hour before she came, because everyone who has heard this story has assumed that it was only joy, and it was not.
I was frightened.
I want to put that in the plainest words I have. I sat in a school library, on a chair designed for a nine-year-old, with a laminated poster about the water cycle over my shoulder, and I looked at my daughter reading a picture book across the room, and every single fear that I had spent seven years arranging in the back of my head came out of its box.
