The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(41)

“Same for me,” I said.

“You didn’t think you’d ever be stabbed and live to tell the tale?” she said.

“I definitely didn’t think I’d ever be stabbed and then want to go and visit the person who stabbed me. Why do you look so happy?”

“I suppose I’m happy because you’re not dead. Because I didn’t kill you. I know it’s not much, but I’m very pleased you’re not dead.” It was less the words and more the way she was looking at me, but we became friends, I think, in that moment. I told her about my recovery, and she told me about hers. Before leaving the hospital, I said, “You know, now that we’ve agreed to not testify against one another, or press charges, we are kind of free to tell each other the truth. We can’t hurt one another anymore.”

She thought for a moment, and said, “I suppose so. You go first. Tell me something truthful.”

“Okay,” I said. “I was following you partly because I thought you were involved in the deaths of Ted and Miranda Severson, but really, I was following you because I’d fallen for you. The police department was right to fire me.”

She smiled, amused, I think, and I said, “Your turn. Something truthful.”

“Falling for me is a big mistake,” she said. “I’m not a bad person but I’ve done bad things.”

That was the first of three visits I made to Lily in the hospital. On my last visit she told me about a construction project happening next to her childhood home, how it might uncover an old well, a place where bodies were buried, she said, and I realized that for whatever reason she had decided to entirely trust me. She had handed me the means to implicate her in a crime. The fact that I chose not to do that was what truly sealed our bond. Since those trips to the hospital, we have never talked on the phone or sent each other text messages. I don’t even know if she has a phone. After being released from the hospital, Lily quit her job as a librarian at Winslow College and moved back to Shepaug, in Connecticut, to her family home, still occupied by her divorced mother and father. She told me once that navigating between them has become her full-time job. Her mother, Sharon Henderson, is a painter who grew up in Pittsburgh, but has lived in Connecticut her entire adult life, while Lily’s father, David, is a relatively famous English novelist who met Sharon when he was a visiting professor at Shepaug University. He lived in America throughout most of Lily’s childhood, until the divorce sent him back to London and a third marriage. But he was permanently housed in Connecticut now, having fled his homeland after drunkenly crashing his car in the Cotswolds, accidentally killing his wife. He’d agreed to move back to his old house with his estranged wife, who needed his money to hold on to the property.

“Right,” I said to David now. We were still talking about Lily. “Does she still have her house up in Winslow, or is she fully moved in down here?”

“Far as I know she still has the house in Winslow. Rents it out, I think. I suspect, and I also suspect she’d agree with me, that owning a home away from here is of enormous symbolic importance to her. Otherwise she might feel she was stuck here at Monk’s House forever, dealing with her mother and me. It’s not much of a life.”

As though on cue, I heard laughter coming from the adjacent kitchen, where Lily and her mother were preparing dinner. I’d been invited to stay over.

“Are you working on anything?” I said to David Kintner, knowing he wasn’t, but wanting to turn the topic of conversation to his writing.

“Ah,” he said. “No, sadly. The words don’t come anymore, at least not the right words and not in the right order. But did you know that Lily and I, more Lily, really, are going through my manuscripts, doing a little pre-archival work before I die?”

“Are all your papers here?” I said.

“Almost all.” Those words came from Lily, who had entered the living room quietly, carrying a cheese board that she placed on the most stable-looking stack of books on the coffee table.

“Yes, almost all,” David said.

“Dad thinks he has old notebooks at a rental house in France that you used to go to . . . when was it?”

“Before you, Lil. And then for two summers when you were too little to remember. But I’m not a hundred percent sure, and I’m not even a hundred percent sure that the house is still where I say it is.”

“I’ll go there and find out,” Lily said. “It’ll be a good excuse to go on a trip. I’m going to get a drink. Can I get anyone anything?”

We both declined. David leaned forward and plucked a grape from the bunch that was decorating the cheese board, and said, “I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’m withering on the vine here.” He was staring at the grape in his hand that had just provided the metaphor, and he looked as though a tear might suddenly slide down one of his cheeks. He wore corduroys that were thin at the knees, and a cardigan sweater over a checked shirt. The most robust thing about him was his thick white hair, parted the way it had always been so that it stuck up a little on his left side. He was tall and thin, but his shoulders had rounded a little with age, and there was a noticeable tremor in his right arm.

“You’re lucky to have her,” I said.

His eyes sharpened, and he said, his voice pitched a little lower, “My understanding from Lil is that you might have something to do with that. That’s one of the reasons I like you.”