I thought you thought you were acting on information, Clare said carefully without accusation. I understand that, but I'd ask you to look at what you saw tonight. Mrs. Mercer, and tell me honestly whether what you saw matches the picture that letter painted. A long silence. Harriet looked at the kitchen, the clean order of it, the evidence of a house running on love and management, and the particular determined grace of a family that had decided to keep going.
"No," Harriet said quietly. "It doesn't," Clare let the silence hold for a moment. "Someone wanted you to come here," Clare said. "Not accusatory, just clear. Someone wanted to create the impression that this family was failing.
I think you were used, Mrs. Mercer, by someone who has a different interest in this situation than the children's welfare. And I think you came here with Eleanor's children in your heart and somebody else's agenda in your hand. Harriet stared at her. Who? She said, "I'm not certain enough to name him," Clare said.
"But I'm asking you not to do anything, not to file anything, not to make any decisions until we know." Harriet looked at her for a long time. You love them, Harriet said. Not an accusation, an observation. Surprised by itself.
Clare didn't answer immediately. They're not mine to love, she said finally. But I can't help it. Harriet was quiet. Eleanor would have liked you, she said.
It was the most unexpected thing she could have said. Clare felt it like a key turning somewhere in her chest. I hope so, she said. Harriet stayed two days. She spent those two days watching, not with the critical assessment of an opponent, but with the quiet attention of a woman trying to understand something she had gotten wrong.
She watched Thomas with his children. She watched Emily draw. She sat with Lily and looked at the photograph she had brought the two girls together. Eleanor, maybe 8 years old. Harriet, 10, in front of a house.
Neither of them lived in anymore. And something happened between the two of them that Clare was not in the room for, but could see in Lily's face afterward, a particular settling. She sat with Ben for almost an hour on the second afternoon, and when she came to find Clare in the kitchen, her eyes were slightly red, and she didn't comment on it, and Clare didn't either. On the morning of the third day, before Thomas took her back to the stage, Harriet found Clare alone in the kitchen. "I'm not going to file anything," Harriet said.
Clare closed her eyes briefly. "Thank you," she said. "But whoever sent me that letter," Harriet said, "I still have it." Clare looked up. "Could I see it?"
She said. The letter was not anonymous after all. The sender had not signed his own name, but the letter head, a cream paper with a small embossed mark at the top that Harriet had not noticed before in her distress, at the contents belonged to the law firm of Kettleworth and Sons Milbrook, the same law firm as Clare learned when she showed it to Jacob that evening that represented the interests of Whitmore's bank in all its property transactions. Jacob stared at the letterhead. "That's Whitmore," Jacob said.