Page 54 of Atonement

I searched his eyes, trying to determine if he was truly comfortable with that or if he was just trying to please me. “We have to do this together, Meyer. I can’t be happy in a place that causes you pain.”

“Which is why we’re making our own. Why should Conrad drive us away even after he’s dead?” He swallowed and cleared his throat, looking away. “Plus … shit, I’ve never told anyone this.”

I waited in silence as he gathered himself. It was a challenge to hold still, keep my emotions in check. I didn’t want to startle him and make him change his mind.

“My mother is buried here somewhere. My birth mother, I mean. I don’t know if there’s a chance in hell of ever finding her body, but being here … it makes me feel close to her. Even though I don’t know her name or what she looked like. This is the only piece of her that I have left, and I don’t want to give it away.”

My feet acted of their own accord, pushing me to the tips of my toes so I could kiss him. Our lips were cold, but our mouths were warm, and as he pulled me ever closer against him I lost all sense of where we stood on the globe. The ground sank away beneath my feet and I began to spin as wildly as if I'd been flung from the earth itself. He'd never spoken of his birth mother, not even when I tried to goad him. And all this time he was harboring the secret deeper inside himself that even I could ever imagine. But he told me. He let me in.

All this time, we've been at war. Even when we acted in the same interest, we never knew enough about each other to truly be on the same side. That would have to change now. We've been protecting ourselves, trying to avoid being hurt anymore deeply then we had to. The wounds were already so profound. But even though it hurt him, he continued to open up to me more and more. I owed him the same.

“We could find your mom,” I said suddenly, without thinking. “It might take awhile, but dogs could help. We could give her a proper burial.”

He nodded, kissed me again for a few minutes before trusting himself to speak. “Let her family know. Wherever they are. Christ, I don’t even know her name.”

I squeezed him tight. “We’ll find out.”

Behind us, Her Majesty whinnied, and before I could turn around she pushed her snout against my back so hard we both fell against the fence. I prepared for Meyer to leap out of the way, but he just laughed and helped me stand back up straight. He smiled at her, holding out his hand tentatively for her to sniff.

"I know, I know, it's cold out here. Ready to go back inside and get under a blanket?"

Her Majesty snorted and raised her head a few times as if nodding. Meyer and I looked at each other as we burst into laughter.

"You heard the lady," I said. "I'd also like some hot cocoa."

"As mesdames wish," he said with a kiss on my nose. "I'm ready to get out of this weather myself."

Her Majesty followed us back inside without a lead, and settled into her stall without complaint. I took a few minutes to brush her down. Her winter coat was coming in quickly, but the staff Meyer had hired had done a good job of taking care of her while I was … indisposed.

Meyer sat his chin on his hands, elbows hanging over the edge of the stall as he watched me tend to the horse he bought me long before either of us could acknowledge the way we really felt about each other. The day she arrived he’d been too afraid to get close to her, much as he’d resisted letting me in. I kept pushing him until he couldn’t hold me off anymore, and when we fell into each other, the collision almost killed us both. But we’d crawled out of the wreckage together, hands clasped tighter than ever before.

Maddie

The day after they dragged Conrad Schaf’s body out of the lake where I once told Meyer he and I would be enemies until we died, Anita was officially arrested for her role in the sale of the company’s weapons to terrorists. She was placed in Federal prison without bail, but she still found a way to cause problems with her constant collect calls. We took the ancient house phone off the hook; Meyer and Joshua both changed their cell phone numbers. Meyer wanted to let her languish, but Mom insisted he pay for a decent lawyer.

“It wouldn’t look right for you to let your sister waste away in prison,” she said. "You have to put on a good face. She's your sister. As far as anyone knows, you still love her like family."

"Still." Meyer snorted. "I never loved her."

"Sweetie." Mom put her hand over his, stilling his movements as he sorted through the book shelf in his father's study.

Meyer wanted to tackle the office first, get everything boxed up, so that we can move on to other, less painful parts of the house. The blood had been cleaned up, the brain matter scraped away, but whenever we walked into this room I thought I could still smell death. This was the room he’d been called to as a child whenever he had to be disciplined; he never left without a bruise or a cut.

"You used to dote on her. You are the one who found her, remember? You came and got me, pulled me to the front door, and there she was all wrapped up. You thought she was a doll."

"And then she opened her mouth and screamed." He snatched his hand away and grabbed a book at random, tossing it over his shoulder like a football. "Here it is," he muttered, picking up a large silver coin encased in plastic. "He told me once this coin was worth half a million dollars. I guess now we'll find out."

Mom sat back and sighed, but never took her eyes off him. "Try to remember that she's human, Meyer. I know it doesn't seem like it. What she went through with Conrad was as painful as what you suffered, just in a different way."

Meyer snatched the coin and walked out of the room, a glare on his face directed at the floor, but from then on we only heard from Anita's lawyer.

One week after Meyer watched his father's body get loaded into the back of an ambulance, the autopsy results determined that he died of a single gunshot wound to the head. The police requested any and all security footage from the house in the days leading up to his death, but of course there was none. Even looking through his phone records yielded no suspects that didn't have an alibi. Thanks to Joshua's final payment to Detective Brantley, no one ever looked closer at us, and the case was filed away as unsolved.

Meyer went back to work, somewhat reluctantly, but it was expected of him, and he couldn’t leave. Not yet. Most days I went with him, working in a corner of his office on trying to help round up refugees wounded by his company's weapons. Both of us were on the phone constantly, and it would have been easier for me to work at my real office, but when I suggested it to him, his face fell so far, I immediately retracted and pulled him into a hug.

"You can do that if you want," he assured me. "You need space to do good work."

I squeezed him tight against me, hoping to push out all his concerns that I would leave and he never see me again. "I can do good work here. With you. One of these days, we won't be so afraid to let each other out of our sight."

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