Page 28 of The Ghostwriter

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Later that evening, Alma tells me my father needs my help with something.

I head upstairs to find him sitting at his desk, staring out the window. “What is it you need?”

He turns to look at me. “I was hoping you might be willing to take a swing through my email just to make sure there isn’t anything important I’m missing.”

“Oh. Sure,” I say. He stands, letting me sit at his desk, the leather chair swiveling under my weight.

I click over to his email and ask, “Password?”

“It should already be logged in,” he tells me.

I point to the screen and say, “It’s asking me for a password.” When he hesitates, I say, “You don’t have to tell me, but I can’t look at your in-box without it.”

“Rebecca,” he says, his voice quiet. As if he’s embarrassed to say the word too loud.

I look at him. “Mom’s middle name is your password?”

“Have you ever been in love?” my father asks, and I think again of Tom. Of how in tune he is with me, and an ache passes through me.

“Why hang on to a woman who left you? It’s been decades,” I say, trying to move the subject away from my love life.

“You can’t erase the past by not thinking about it.” My father gives ahollow laugh. “Believe me, I’ve tried. Your mother was the best thing that ever happened to me. Better than any of my books or awards.”

I snort and look back at the computer screen. “She left you to raise her daughter alone.”

“My daughter too,” he reminds me, his voice quiet.

I type in my mother’s middle name and find hundreds of messages waiting for him in his in-box. “What do you want me to do in here?” I ask.

“Clean it out,” he says. “Make sure there isn’t something buried in there that I need to deal with.”

I scroll through emails from theNew York TimesandWashington Post.Solicitations from local politicians asking for donations. Tons of junk mail from retailers. “The Gap?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I like their T-shirts.”

On the second page, I find something that might need a response. “They want you to be a keynote speaker at SouthwestLit.” A big literary conference held in New Mexico every fall.

“Email them back. Tell them I’m not available.”

I hesitate. “Do you want me to identify myself as writing on your behalf?”

“Of course not. Just pretend to be me.”

“How aboutThank you for the honor; however, I have other obligations that preclude me from attending.”

He nods his approval, so I type it, then hit Send.

“There are still several more pages, but it’s mostly junk. Do you want me to delete them or mark them as read?”

“I don’t give a shit, Olivia,” he sighs. I turn back to the computer and say, “Let me just…” but the rest of my sentence evaporates. On the screen in front of me, buried about halfway down, is a name that makes my stomach turn to lead.

John Calder.

***

It’s past midnight when I log into my father’s email on my own computer. All evening, I’d wrestled with the idea of whether I should read it, or if I should just let it go. But I can’t shake the discomfort of the two of them talking. Colluding. My father never mentioned he knew Calder, but there was an email in his in-box telling me otherwise.

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