R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

The line goes dead.

Ray Hartmann stands there for some moments before he gently replaces the receiver in the cradle.

He walks out back to the kitchen and stands there for a moment watching his wife and his daughter unload groceries.

He sees it in a different light, and this time his eyes are open .

Carol looks up at him and frowns. ‘What is it?’ she asks.

Hartmann smiles and shakes his head. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he says.

‘Happy Christmas to you too.’

‘I love you, Carol.’

Carol Hartmann pauses with a watermelon in her hand. She looks at Jess. Jess is frowning and smiling at the same time.

‘What the hell’s gotten into you?’ she asks. ‘You gone soft in the head or what?’

Hartmann shakes his head. He looks down at his shoes, and then up at his wife and his daughter.

‘So you gonna stand there like a retard or you gonna help us with the groceries?’

‘I’m gonna help with the groceries,’ Ray Hartmann says, ‘and then maybe we go see a movie together and bring some pizza home.’

‘Good deal,’ Jess says.

‘Good deal,’ replies her father, and believes that life defines itself in circles, and where we start, there we also find our own conclusions, and this is the nature of the world we have created and all we have become.

He steps into the kitchen and lifts a grocery bag from the floor.

He watches his wife, and when she turns towards him he looks away. He smiles to himself. He feels complete; perhaps for the first time in his life he feels complete.

There are things done, and things said, but somehow all these things are lost in the slow-motion manic slide of time. Lost, but never truly forgotten.

Ray Hartmann believes in faith, and faith – perhaps after all this time – finally, unconditionally, believes in him.

R. J. Ellory is the bestselling author of numerous novels. A Quiet Belief in Angels, a Richard & Judy Book Club selection in 2008, was shortlisted for the Barry Award, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers’ Prize and was winner of the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide. R.J. Ellory currently lives in England.

www.rjellory.com