It was straight.
Deliberate.
Like a cut made by a blade.
Rosalie touched it gently.
Gideon flinched.
His expression changed.
Not from pain.
From memory.
He seized the notebook.
My mother said they cut me after the accident.
Rosalie’s heart quickened.
Who?
Gideon’s pencil stopped.
Outside, wind battered snow against the cabin walls.
The fire cracked behind them.
Finally, Gideon wrote:
Doctor Ashford.
Rosalie
stared at the name.
Ashford.
Her name.
Her father’s name.
She looked up slowly.
Gideon seemed confused by her reaction.
Rosalie’s fingers began trembling.
“My father?”
Gideon watched her lips.
Then something terrible seemed to occur to him.
He crossed the room, opened the old cedar chest beneath the window, and removed a small leather packet tied with faded string.
Inside were papers yellowed with age.
He handed one to Rosalie.
It was a medical receipt dated twenty-nine years earlier.
At the bottom was a signature she recognized immediately.
Dr. Silas Ashford.
Her father.
And beneath it, written in a different hand:
Payment received for surgical removal of projectile from Gideon Rook, age nine.
Rosalie looked from the document to the metallic object still visible inside Gideon’s ear.
If the projectile had been removed twenty-nine years ago…
what was still buried inside him?
Rosalie read the receipt three times.
Each
time, the words became worse.
Payment received for surgical removal of projectile from Gideon Rook, age nine.
Her father’s signature curved underneath in the same elegant hand Rosalie had seen on household accounts, medical labels, letters demanding payment from neighbors, and finally the document that had surrendered his daughter to Gideon Rook for fifty dollars.
Silas Ashford had once been Coldwater’s only physician.
People still called him Doctor Ashford despite the fact that drink had ruined his reputation years ago.
Rosalie had grown up listening to stories about the brilliant young surgeon her father used to be.
She had never heard Gideon’s name among them.
She lowered the paper.
