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""The third blow tore through the dining-room wall just as Victoria backed into the glass table and knocked a crystal water pitcher onto its side.
Arthur barely heard the water spilling across the glass because the crack of the sledgehammer had opened something behind the plaster that should not have been there.
A black space appeared between the studs.
Not insulation, not wiring, not the shallow cavity Hannah had expected when she told him the measurements of the hallway made no sense.
A room.
Arthur dropped the broken strip of molding in his hand and stared into darkness while plaster dust rolled around his shoes.
“Again,” he said.
Hannah had already raised the hammer.
Victoria found her voice before Hannah could swing.
“Stop.”
The word came out thin and frightened, nothing like the cool irritation she had worn for the previous ten minutes while Arthur accused the contractor of falsifying renovation plans.
Hannah looked at her.
Arthur did too.
Victoria’s fingers were spread against the edge of the glass table, and for the first time since Arthur had known her, she seemed unable to decide what expression belonged on her face.
That frightened him more than the hidden room.
“Arthur,” she said, “you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Hannah swung.
The hammer struck beside the first opening.
Plaster burst into the hallway.
Something moved in the darkness.
Arthur was across the rubble before the hammer stopped bouncing in Hannah’s hands.
He tore loose a piece of fractured drywall, cutting his palm on an exposed screw, and shoved his arm through the opening.
His fingers touched cloth.
Then bone.
A shoulder so narrow he could nearly close his hand around it.
“Jesus.”
A cough answered him from inside.
Arthur dropped to one knee.
“Hey.”
Another cough.
“Can you hear me?”
The darkness shifted.
Arthur reached farther until his shoulder struck the jagged edge of the wall.
A small hand caught his wrist.
It was cold.
For one disorienting second Arthur could not breathe either.
“Get this open,” he said.
Hannah was already pulling loose plaster rather than risking another blind swing.
Arthur widened the hole with his bleeding hand until he could get both arms inside.
He found the child beneath the shoulders.
The boy tried to help, but there was almost nothing in him.
His knees scraped across something inside the chamber as Arthur pulled.
Dust came first.
Then messy brown hair.
Then a narrow, filthy face.
The boy coughed against Arthur’s sleeve.
“Easy,” Arthur said.
The child’s sweatshirt snagged on broken plaster.
Arthur ripped the plaster away.
“Easy, easy, I’ve got you.”
The boy clutched something black against his chest.
Arthur shifted his grip beneath the child’s arms and pulled again.
The boy made a strangled sound.
“Wait,” Hannah said.
She reached through the lower opening, freed the boy’s jeans from a splintered strip of framing, and nodded.
Arthur drew him out.
The child collapsed against him.
Arthur smelled dust, sweat, urine, and the stale trapped odor of a space without proper ventilation.
The boy was trying to inhale too quickly.
“Please save me,” he gasped.
Arthur tightened his arms around him.
“I can’t breathe.”
“I have you.”
Arthur turned his face toward Hannah.
“Call 911.”
She was already reaching for her phone.
Arthur pulled the boy farther from the debris and lifted him against his chest.
The child’s hand seized the lapel of his charcoal jacket.
Arthur looked down.
The boy looked up.
Everything in the hallway became strangely quiet.
Arthur saw the brown mixed with hazel in those enormous eyes.
He saw the small notch in the left eyebrow.
He saw a nose he had touched with one finger in a hospital room nine years earlier while a nurse laughed because the newborn kept turning toward his hand.
The years between those two moments vanished so violently that Arthur almost dropped him.
“No.”
The boy’s fingers tightened.
Arthur’s knees weakened.
“No.”
Victoria moved behind him.
Her heel clicked once against the pale floor.
Arthur turned his head.
She stopped.
The boy pressed his face against Arthur’s chest.
Arthur had spent six years teaching himself not to search for his son in crowds.
At airports, he had stopped looking at boys traveling with grandparents.
At restaurants, he had learned not to turn when a child laughed with the same breathless hiccup Daniel used to make.
He had deleted the automated birthday reminders but had never managed to remove Daniel’s height marks from the pantry door of their old house.
Victoria had been there when the police detective told him there was no reasonable hope.
Victoria had sat beside him at the memorial.
Victoria had chosen the photograph.
Arthur looked back at the child.
“Daniel?”
The boy began shaking.
Arthur touched the side of his face with the back of two dusty fingers.
“Daniel.”
The child nodded once.
Arthur made a sound he would never afterward be able to describe.
He lowered himself onto the floor because his legs would no longer hold both of them.
Daniel folded into him.
Arthur put one hand behind his son’s head and felt the hair, the skull beneath it, the impossible warmth of a living child he had buried without a body.
Hannah stopped speaking to the emergency dispatcher.
Her face had gone pale.
Victoria remained beside the dining table.
Nobody looked at her until Daniel did.
The change in him was immediate.
His shoulders locked.
His breathing shortened.
Arthur felt it before he understood it.
Daniel pushed the little black object between them.
It was a recorder.
A blue indicator glowed near Arthur’s thumb.
Daniel stared at him.
“She lied about everything, Father.”
Father.
Not Dad.
Daniel had called him Dad until the day he disappeared.
Arthur slowly raised his eyes to Victoria.
She shook her head.
Once.
Barely.
Arthur stood with Daniel held against him.
His right arm supported the boy while his left hand closed around the recorder.
May you like
“You told me my son was dead.”
Victoria opened her mouth.
