Chương 3
“I forgot because Miles was screaming.”
Her breath hitched.
“A man got into the car with her.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because Mom came back inside after she started the car.”
Ryan went pale before she finished.
“She locked the back door,” Tessa said, “and she told him he was never supposed to know where we lived.”
Ryan’s face emptied so quickly that I stopped thinking of him as a stranger and started thinking of him as somebody who had just heard the wrong name.
“What man?” he asked.
I held up one finger and turned away from him.
“Tessa, did Mom say anything else?”
“She was whispering.”
“Could you hear the man?”
“A little.”
“What did he sound like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Old, young, angry?”
There was a pause.
“He said she was making everything harder.”
Ryan moved closer.
I put a hand against his chest without looking at him.
“Tess, did you see where he was?”
“Outside.”
“Near the car?”
“I think.”
“Did Mom seem like she wanted him there?”
Another pause came, longer this time.
“She kept checking the window.”
“Okay.”
“And she told me to take Miles upstairs.”
My grip tightened on the phone.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because his bottle was in the kitchen.”
A small domestic accident of timing had kept my daughter close enough to hear something Claire had apparently wanted hidden.
“Did Mom get angry?”
“She said, ‘Tessa, please, just this once do what I tell you.’”
Ryan shut his eyes.
I heard Mrs. Alvarez in the background asking Tessa whether she wanted some water.
“Tess, I need you to do one more thing for me.”
“What?”
“Give the phone back to Mrs. Alvarez, and stay with her.”
“Are you finding Mom?”
“I’m trying.”
“That means no.”
“It means I’m trying.”
She sniffed.
“Okay.”
Mrs. Alvarez came back on.
“I’ve got them.”
“Lock the doors.”
“They’re already locked.”
“Don’t open them unless you know who it is.”
Her voice changed.
“Grant, is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
That was all she said.
It was one of the reasons I trusted her.
I ended the call and looked at Ryan.
He had backed toward the porch.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“That answer isn’t going to work anymore.”
“I said I don’t know.”
“You knew she was coming here.”
“Yes.”
“You knew she’d left the kids before.”
“Yes.”
“You knew enough to tell her not to bring them again.”
His jaw flexed.
“Because the last time she brought Miles, she left him in the car seat inside while she talked to me in the back room.”
I stared at him.
“For how long?”
“Ten minutes.”
“You counted?”
“I noticed.”
“Did you tell her husband?”
“No.”
“Then congratulations, you’re useful after the fact.”
He absorbed that without defending himself.
I hated him a little less for it.
Not enough to matter.
“What is this place?”
Ryan looked toward the boarded window.
“Our mother’s house.”
“You said the woman who raised you.”
“She raised me.”
“Not Claire?”
“Not after Claire was six.”
I waited.
Ryan rubbed the back of his neck.
“She split us up.”
“Who did?”
“Our mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she could.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I grew up with.”
He walked to the porch and keyed a code into the real-estate lockbox.
The metal cover dropped open.
He took out a key.
“You want the long version while your wife is missing, or do you want to see why she came?”
I followed him inside.
The house smelled like drywall dust, old carpet, and something faintly medicinal.
Most of the furniture was gone.
Rectangles of cleaner paint showed where framed pictures had hung.
A ceiling fan turned slowly in the living room even though the air-conditioning was off.
“She still lives here?”
“Not anymore.”
“Where is she?”
“Memory care.”
I stopped.
“You said Claire was meeting her.”
“She was supposed to.”
“Here?”
“I was bringing her from the facility.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because she had a bad morning.”
Ryan’s voice softened despite himself.
“She threw a tray at an aide and spent twenty minutes insisting I was our father.”
“So you canceled.”
“I tried.”
He held up his phone.
“Claire wouldn’t accept it.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s been trying to get one clear conversation out of our mother for six weeks.”
We entered what had once been a dining room.
A folding table stood under the light fixture.
On it were photocopied birth records, school photographs, envelopes, and a yellow legal pad covered in Claire’s handwriting.
I recognized the way she crossed her sevens.
That tiny familiarity felt obscene in a room full of things I had never seen.
Ryan pointed at the documents.
“Claire found me in March.”
“How?”
“An ancestry database.”
“She never told me she used one.”
“She didn’t tell you a lot of things.”
I turned on him.
“That seems to be the family specialty.”
He flinched.
Good.
I was glad.
Then I hated myself for being glad.
Ryan sat on the edge of the folding table.
“Our mother was seventeen when I was born.”
He gestured toward a photograph of two children standing beside an inflatable pool.
The girl was unmistakably Claire.
Same narrow chin.
Same serious eyebrows.
Beside her stood a skinny boy with sunburned shoulders and a gap between his front teeth.
Ryan.
“The man she married wasn’t my father,” he said.
“He wasn’t Claire’s either.”
“Who was?”
“Different men.”
He gave a humorless laugh.
“We’re apparently a complicated little diagram.”
I picked up the photograph.
On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written Claire and Ryan, summer 1998.
Exactly as Tessa had remembered.
“Why was Claire told she was an only child?”
“Because when she was six, our mother married a man named Philip Caldwell.”
The name meant nothing to me.
“He wanted Claire.”
“Wanted her how?”
“To raise.”
I looked at him.
May you like
Ryan’s mouth hardened.
“He did not want me.”
