Chương 9
“Was Michael in that picture?”
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
Evelyn did not answer.
“Evelyn?”
“I haven’t looked at it in years.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I know.”
A bedroom door opened upstairs.
Claire glanced up.
Mara came down slowly, carrying Claire’s laptop against her chest.
“Mom?”
Claire covered the phone.
“Why do you have that?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you took my laptop?”
“I was looking for Grandpa.”
Claire’s irritation faltered.
“What?”
“You said Grandma can’t delete me from the family.”
Mara came down another step.
“So I wanted pictures she couldn’t delete.”
Claire’s throat tightened.
“I searched Grandpa Frank in the family pictures.”
The scanned archive used filenames Frank had painstakingly entered himself.
Dates, places, first names.
Mara sat on the bottom step and opened the laptop.
“There are, like, a million.”
“Come here.”
Mara carried it to the table.
The search field contained FRANK.
Rows of scanned photographs filled the screen.
Mara pointed to one.
“I clicked this because Grandma looks weird.”
Claire almost corrected her.
Then she saw the photograph.
A younger Frank stood outside a brick apartment building with his arm around Evelyn.
Richard was not there.
A third man stood on Evelyn’s other side, holding a paper plate and squinting into the sun.
Claire forgot Evelyn was still on the phone.
The man was younger than Daniel was now.
His hair was longer.
His face was thinner.
But the shape of the mouth was Daniel’s.
So was the slight asymmetry around the eyes that Claire had watched for sixteen years across breakfast tables, arguments, hospital waiting rooms, and the delivery room where Daniel had cried before Mara did.
Beneath the scan, Frank had typed a filename.
JUNE 1983 - EVELYN, FRANK, MICHAEL R.
“Claire?” Evelyn whispered from the phone.
Claire enlarged the image.
Something white protruded from Michael’s shirt pocket.
Not paper.
An employee badge.
The scan was good enough that part of the print remained legible.
Claire leaned closer.
Mara leaned with her.
“Is that Dad?”
“No.”
“He looks like Dad.”
Claire’s phone vibrated against her ear with an incoming message.
Daniel.
She ignored it.
Then another arrived.
A photograph this time.
Claire opened it.
Daniel had sent a picture of a document lying on Peter’s kitchen counter.
His message beneath it contained six words.
Peter found this in Dad’s files.
Claire enlarged the photograph.
At the top was the letterhead of Whitcomb & Hale.
Below it was Frank’s name, a date from four months before his death, and a subject line that made Claire sit down.
CONFIDENTIAL INSTRUCTIONS REGARDING DANIEL MERCER.
At the bottom of Daniel’s photograph, beneath several lines too blurred to read, one sentence was sharp enough.
Do not contact Michael Reyes until I have spoken to Daniel myself.
Claire read the sentence twice, then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less deliberate.
Mara tugged at her sleeve.
“Who’s Michael?”
Claire locked the phone without answering.
Evelyn was still breathing into her ear.
“Claire?”
“Frank knew his name.”
The crying stopped.
“What?”
“The lawyer’s letter names Michael Reyes.”
Evelyn made a small sound that Claire could not place.
“Frank knew.”
“When?”
“Four months before he died.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“He never said anything.”
“He apparently intended to.”
Mara reached toward the laptop.
Claire closed it before she could enlarge the photograph again.
“Mom.”
“Not now.”
“You said that before.”
“I know.”
“That’s what grown-ups say when they’re lying.”
Claire looked at her daughter.
Mara’s face was tired rather than accusing, which made it worse.
“I’m not lying.”
“You’re hiding it.”
“Yes.”
Mara blinked.
The answer had surprised them both.
Claire lowered the phone.
“There are things happening between the adults in this family that I don’t understand yet.”
“Is Dad’s dad not Grandpa?”
Claire felt the question enter the room and take up space.
“I don’t know.”
“But that man looks like Dad.”
“He does.”
“So you do know.”
“Looking alike isn’t the same as knowing.”
Mara frowned at the laptop.
“That’s annoying.”
“It really is.”
Evelyn said Claire’s name again from the phone.
Claire brought it back to her ear.
“I need to call Daniel.”
“Don’t show him that picture.”
Claire stared at the dark laptop screen.
“Why?”
“I just need time.”
“For what?”
“To think.”
“You’ve had forty-three years.”
The number came out before Claire could stop it.
Evelyn inhaled sharply.
“That isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Claire’s voice stayed low because Mara was standing three feet away.
“Neither is asking me to manage Daniel’s reaction to a secret you kept before he could walk.”
“I was twenty-four.”
“And now you’re sixty-seven.”
“I know how old I am.”
“Good, because tonight everyone seems confused about which years belong to them.”
“Claire.”
“What?”
“I loved Frank.”
Claire almost laughed, but there was nothing funny enough available.
“I believe you.”
“You don’t sound like you do.”
“I don’t care how I sound right now.”
Mara had begun picking at a loose thread on the rabbit’s ear.
Claire watched her wind it around one finger.
Evelyn whispered, “Michael didn’t know.”
Claire stopped.
“About Daniel?”
“I never told him.”
“Did Richard?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does Richard know he was a possibility?”
“Yes.”
That landed differently.
Claire turned away from Mara.
“When did you tell him?”
“After Daniel was born.”
“And?”
“He said Daniel was Frank’s son.”
“That sounds convenient.”
“It wasn’t kindness.”
Evelyn’s voice hardened for the first time.
“He wanted nothing to do with it.”
“Did Frank know about you and Richard?”
“Eventually.”
“And Michael?”
A long pause answered first.
“I don’t know.”
Claire looked at Daniel’s message again.
Frank had known enough to instruct a lawyer not to contact Michael.
“Did you ever see Michael after Daniel was born?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“Daniel was almost two.”
“Where?”
“A grocery store.”
Claire waited.
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“What happened?”
May you like
“He saw me near the produce section.”
Despite everything, Claire pictured it with ridiculous specificity, two people standing beside pyramids of oranges while one of them carried a secret large enough to alter three generations.
