Chương 4
“Are we still sleeping at your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
Dana hesitated.
“However long you need.”
“My room is at home.”
“I know.”
“My books are there.”
“I know.”
“My blue cup.”
“We can get the cup.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, maybe.”
Sophie looked down.
The practical problems of grief were beginning to crowd the larger revelation aside.
Ethan had watched that happen all week.
Leah died of a brain aneurysm on a Tuesday morning while Sophie was at school. There had been no warning, no prolonged illness, no final arrangement. Dana had received a call from the hospital while she was standing in a grocery store checkout line with frozen waffles in her cart.
By Wednesday, everybody wanted decisions.
Funeral home.
School.
Insurance.
House keys.
Death certificates.
What Sophie should be told.
Where Sophie should sleep.
Who could legally make decisions for her.
Ethan had entered the situation through a sealed envelope Leah left in a fireproof box.
Inside was his name.
His phone number.
A copy of Sophie’s birth certificate listing no father.
A paternity test from six years earlier.
And a letter.
Dana called him at 11:18 Wednesday night.
He had been in bed beside Rachel.
He let the call go to voicemail.
Dana called again.
Then she texted.
This is Dana Bennett. Leah is dead. Sophie needs you.
Ethan had gotten out of bed and gone downstairs.
Rachel remained asleep.
He listened to the voicemail in the kitchen beside the refrigerator.
He had been lying ever since.
Not for six years.
That distinction no longer comforted him.
The older lie had been quieter.
More carefully constructed.
Leah had told him she was pregnant two weeks after he and Rachel had begun fertility treatment.
Ethan had panicked.
There was no nobler word for it.
He and Leah had worked on the same redevelopment project in Baltimore. She was a landscape architect. Ethan handled financing. They had spent nine months arguing over trees, drainage budgets, contractor delays, and whether a rooftop courtyard needed mature plantings.
The affair lasted eleven weeks.
It was neither romantic enough to justify what it destroyed nor casual enough to dismiss.
Leah ended it before she discovered the pregnancy.
When she called him, Ethan drove three hours to Baltimore and sat across from her in a diner.
He offered money.
Leah threw a packet of sugar at him.
Not hard.
That somehow made it worse.
“I’m not asking you to buy your way out,” she said. “I’m asking whether you intend to be a father.”
Ethan had looked at the laminate table between them.
“I don’t know.”
“Then figure it out.”
“I need time.”
“You have maybe seven months.”
He asked if she was sure the child was his.
She stared at him for so long he wished she had slapped him instead.
A prenatal paternity test later confirmed it.
Rachel became pregnant with Maya three months after that.
Ethan told Leah.
She became very quiet.
Then she said, “You’re not going to tell her, are you?”
He should have answered.
He did not.
Leah chose for him.
She said Sophie would have her surname. Ethan would not be listed on the birth certificate. He could contribute financially through an account managed by an attorney. He could receive updates if Leah wished to send them.
He could not appear unpredictably.
He could not introduce himself as Sophie’s father while maintaining a separate family that did not know she existed.
“If you want to be her father,” Leah told him, “you do it honestly. I’m not raising her inside your secret.”
At the time Ethan had experienced the arrangement as punishment.
Years later he understood it as a boundary.
He had violated it in small ways.
Birthday cards unsigned.
A telescope.
Books.
A college savings account Leah did not request.
Twice, when work took him to Baltimore, he had watched Sophie from a distance.
Once at age three, chasing pigeons near the harbor while Leah laughed.
Once at five, leaving a dance class in purple rain boots.
He never approached.
He told himself restraint made him decent.
Now, sitting beside Sophie, he understood the arrogance of that.
Dana’s phone rang.
She looked at the screen.
“I need to take this.”
She walked several yards away.
Maya leaned close to Sophie.
“Do you like pancakes?”
Sophie shrugged.
“Sometimes.”
“My dad makes bad ones.”
Ethan looked at her.
“That is slander too.”
“You burn the edges.”
“I crisp the edges.”
“You burn them.”
Sophie looked at Ethan.
“My mom burned toast.”
The sentence changed the air.
Maya stopped smiling.
Sophie rubbed Milton’s stitched eye.
“She always scraped it with a knife.”
Dana, still on the phone, turned slightly away.
Ethan’s throat tightened.
Sophie continued.
“It made crumbs everywhere.”
Nobody knew whether she wanted an answer.
Maya finally said, “My mom puts too much butter on toast.”
Ethan almost corrected her.
He did not.
Sophie nodded.
“Too much butter is okay.”
The girls fell silent.
After a minute, Maya slipped off the bench and found a stick in the grass.
Sophie followed.
They began scratching lines into a patch of dirt near the tree roots.
Ethan watched them.
Dana returned.
“That was the funeral home.”
He nodded.
“Everything okay?”
“No.”
He waited.
She sighed.
“Yes. Everything is whatever ‘okay’ means now.”
She sat at the far end of the bench.
For several seconds they watched the girls drawing something incomprehensible in the dirt.
Then Dana said, “Your wife is going to leave you.”
“I know.”
“You say that like you lost your keys.”
“What would you like me to sound like?”
“I don’t know. More ruined.”
He looked at her.
“I’m working on it.”
Dana almost smiled.
Then did not.
“You had six years.”
“I know.”
“Leah gave you chances.”
“I know.”
“She was angry at you right until the end.”
His jaw tightened.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
He turned toward her.
May you like
Dana’s eyes were wet now, but her voice remained controlled.
“She called me three weeks ago because Sophie’s school had a father-daughter reading morning. She wanted to know whether letting some other dad sit with Sophie would make it worse.”
