Chapter 2 - The Red Scarf
Boston appeared unfamiliar through the taxi window.
Brick buildings.
Traffic lights.
Pedestrians moving beneath a pale March sky.
Everything was brighter than memory and less gentle than imagination.
Madeline thought about Andrew’s face.
She remembered it younger.
Softer.
During her blindness, his voice became the shape she trusted most.
“Don’t worry,” he often told her. “I’m your eyes now.”
The sentence once comforted her.
In the taxi, it made her cold.
Madeline climbed the stairs to their apartment slowly, one hand on the railing. Before unlocking the door, she smelled coffee.
Then perfume.
Sweet vanilla.
Not hers.
The apartment was flooded with daylight.
Curtains she believed remained closed had been pulled wide. The windows stood open, letting cold air move through the rooms.
A red silk scarf lay across the gray sofa.
Madeline recognized it immediately.
Her younger sister, Elise, always wore red.
Andrew had told Madeline that Elise moved to Chicago two years earlier after an argument between the sisters.
He claimed Elise could not cope with the blindness.
“Some people run from tragedy,” Andrew said whenever Madeline asked why Elise stopped calling.
Madeline defended her sister’s absence.
Prayed for her.
Cried for the relationship she believed illness had destroyed.
May you like
Then she heard a woman laughing in the kitchen.
A laugh she had known since childhood.
