The Echo of Old Books(74)

“No. I was just working on the holiday newsletter for the store. Are you calling to tell me you just got off the phone with Zachary?”

“Nope. Still haven’t heard back.”

“Well, it’s only been a few days.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He sounded distracted, distant. “You sound funny. What’s up?”

“I’ve been reading.”

“Ah. How far have you gotten?”

“The stuff about Helene and the asylum. I mean . . . holy hell.”

“I know. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just, you know . . . processing.” There was a pause as he pulled in a breath, then let it out heavily. “My Jewish great-grandmother married a Nazi sympathizer, who locked her up to hide her from his Nazi-loving friends. How did I not know any of that? We’re Jewish, or at least partly Jewish, and no one ever said a word. Did my father know? And if so, why keep it a secret? And then Marian, finding out the way she did. My god . . .”

He sounded genuinely rattled. And a little angry. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah. It’s just weird, you know? I never thought of the Mannings as the ideal American family, but this is worse than anything I could have imagined.”

Ashlyn thought of her own parents. The mother who couldn’t be bothered to save herself. The father who’d climbed up to the attic and put a shotgun under his chin because he wanted to shake his fist at God. “There’s no such thing as the ideal American family, Ethan. It’s a myth.”

“I guess. Have you finished Forever, and Other Lies yet?”

“Almost, and it isn’t looking good on my end either.”

“That’s why I stopped. I needed a break.” He sighed, weary or disgusted, perhaps both. “I guess we know what happens next, though—and whose fault it ended up being.”

Ashlyn considered this a moment. She’d thought so, too, at first. But now she wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t get past the echoes she’d picked up the first time she touched the books, the eerily similar fusion of bitterness and grief. People lied. Echoes didn’t. Belle and Hemi both genuinely believed themselves to be the wronged party, which seemed to suggest that there was more to the story than they currently knew. Perhaps more than they’d ever know. But she couldn’t say any of that to Ethan.

“Or maybe we just think we know and it was actually something else.”

“You think there’s something else coming?”

“I’m just saying it feels like that wasn’t all of it. He loved Belle, Ethan. Enough to walk away from a story he clearly believed every word of. I could be wrong. Maybe it was enough to make Belle walk away—she was certainly furious—but my gut tells me there’s something else.”

“What makes you think that?”

Ashlyn hesitated, weighing how to answer. “Do you believe in women’s intuition?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Well then, we’ll go with that.”

“To be honest, I think I know all I want to.”

Ashlyn could hear the finality in his tone, and a part of her understood. He hadn’t wanted to get involved to begin with, and now he’d learned things about his family that would make anyone reluctant to look deeper.

“I get it. I’ve been feeling a little like that too. I know there’s not going to be a happy ending—both of them make that clear right off the bat—and yet I find myself dragging my feet, dreading the rest of what’s coming. I mean, I already know what’s coming . . . but the actual how. Who did what to whom and what happened after. But I will read it. All the way to the end. Because I can’t not know all of it. Not when we’ve read this far.”

Ethan let out a groan. “I suppose I should at least finish Belle’s book.”

“Or . . . we could read them together,” she suggested on impulse.

“Together? How would that work?”

“Okay, not together together. But we could do it over the phone. There aren’t that many pages left in either book. We could take turns, with me reading from Forever, and Other Lies and you Regretting Belle. We could schedule a couple of reading dates. Well, not dates, but you know, set a regular time. Maybe an hour. Or less if you want. Unless you don’t have time. And you probably don’t with your writing. Never mind, it was a silly idea.”

“No,” Ethan said when she finally went quiet. “Let’s do it.”

“Seriously?”

“If it’s going to count as a date, then yeah.”

A date.

The mere word set off alarm bells in Ashlyn’s head. Should she clarify? Tell him that’s not what she meant? Did it even matter? They’d be talking on the phone. How dangerous could it be? “All right, then. A reading date. Should I pencil you in for tomorrow night?”

“Actually, I was thinking we could start tonight. Would you mind? I’m not really ready to hang up.”

“No, that’s fine. It might be a good way to wind down.”

“Like a bedtime story,” Ethan supplied. “Except those never worked for me. My mom used to read to me when I was a kid, but I’d fight falling asleep in order to keep her reading.”

Ashlyn liked that she could hear the smile in his voice. She set her pad and pen aside and settled back against the pillows. “Do you think your mom ever read Belle’s and Hemi’s books?”