The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

She would miss them. The certainty was swift and heavy. It sat in her stomach like a stone. They borrowed her clothes, broke her lipsticks, scratched her records, but she would miss them. The noise and heat of them, the movement and squabbles and crushing joy.

It was hard to believe that the woman whose enormous presence vanquished every nighttime terror was this same pallid creature pinned beneath the hospital sheet.

Five children squawking and squabbling, a farmhouse that dripped somewhere new each time it rained, birds nesting in the chimneys. It was like some kind of nightmare. Except that it hadn’t been. It had been perfect. The sort of home life that was written about by sentimental novelists in the type of books branded nostalgic by critics.

When he had children, Jimmy hoped he’d know just the right words to say to make everything better when they cried as if the world was coming apart, but it was harder somehow when the crying person was your dad. There were so many people weeping into their pillows these days—Jimmy

lightning-bright flash of awareness that came too fast to pin down but that had something to do with the innocence of children, the willingness with which they trusted, and how little it took for them to put their small, soft hand in yours and presume you wouldn’t let them down.

The thought came to her of the many nights her mother had done the same thing for her: been woken from her sleep by a cry in the dark and rushed down the hall to chase her daughter’s monsters away, to stroke her hair and hum in her ear, “Hush, little wing . . . there now, hush.”