Grandpa walked over — sixty people silently making a path — and knelt down at the right-hand corner of the window bench, where the seat meets the frame.
“Every piece I’ve built for fifty years,” he said, “signs its own name.”
He pointed.
There, carved into the oak, smaller than a dime, exactly where a purse had been sitting all evening:
A honeybee.
Margaret pulled her reading glasses from her clutch, bent, and looked.
“There’s one in my library,” she announced to the room.
“Under the silverware drawer at the Bennetts’,” someone called out.
“Inside our pantry door,” said someone else.
“Our staircase—”
“The window seat in my mother’s—”
The voices came from every corner of the room, one after another, and I watched the Hales stand in the middle of it and understand,
in real time, exactly whose town they had been living in.
“He was never one old carpenter working by himself,” Margaret said quietly.
“He had fifty years of us.
You just never bothered to look under the surface of anything.”
Daniel Brooks — who had arrived, coincidentally, with the second wave of guests — chose that moment to step forward with his leather folder.
“Mr. Hale. While everyone’s here.
You should know the Reyes and Callahan matters have been consolidated with ours.
Three liens, one case, and a very interesting question about whether the pattern qualifies as intentional.
Your refinance lender has been notified, as required.”
“Get out,” Garrison said hoarsely. “All of you, get out of my house—”
“Gladly,” Margaret said.
She collected her coat.
And then sixty guests — the entire country club crowd the Hales had spent a fortune trying to impress — quietly set down their glasses and followed her
