Chương 2
“Where?”
“Our place.”
“What happened?”
“She told me to go in the bathroom.”
Alexander waited.
Lily’s fingers tightened on the lavender blanket.
“I heard her yell.”
The smallest infant whimpered.
Lily immediately lowered her face.
“Shh. Nora. It’s okay.”
Alexander looked at the second bundle.
“And her?”
“Mae.”
“Nora and Mae.”
“They’re sisters.”
“I figured that part out.”
Lily considered him with the grave suspicion of a child who no longer trusted adults to be competent.
“Twins.”
“Right.”
She looked down again.
Marcus turned in the front seat.
“I’ve called 911. We’re going straight to St. Catherine’s. Police are meeting us there.”
Alexander nodded.
Lily flinched at the word police.
“No police.”
Alexander saw it.
“Why?”
“Mom said don’t call anybody until I found you.”
“Did she say why?”
“She said some people wear nice clothes.”
Marcus’s eyes moved briefly toward Alexander’s black suit.
Lily noticed.
“Not him.”
Marcus looked back toward the windshield.
“Glad we cleared that up.”
Alexander rubbed his thumb across the closed silver locket in his palm.
Ten months earlier, Claire had sat opposite him in a twenty-four-hour diner near Logan Airport and told him there were people inside his company he should stop trusting.
He had asked for names.
She had refused.
He had asked for documents.
She said she wasn’t ready.
They had argued for forty minutes, ordered coffee neither of them drank, and ended up back at his hotel because the difference between anger and grief had always been dangerously thin between them.
By morning she was gone.
A message arrived at 6:12.
Don’t look for me.
He had looked anyway.
For three weeks.
Then he stopped because Claire had taught him, painfully, that refusing to respect a boundary did not become noble merely because he called it concern.
Now a five-year-old was sitting in his car with two newborn babies and Claire’s locket.
Alexander looked toward the infant called Nora.
“How old are they?”
“Twelve days.”
His gaze snapped to Lily.
“You’ve been outside carrying twelve-day-old babies?”
“Only from our building.”
“Where is your building?”
“Behind yours.”
He stared at her.
Marcus turned again.
“The Renshaw?”
Lily nodded.
The Renshaw was a renovated residential building half a block from Blackwood Tower. Blackwood Development owned a minority interest in it through an old partnership.
Alexander felt the first clean edge of anger.
Claire had been living eighty yards from his office.
“How long?”
Lily shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“Days? Weeks?”
“Since before Christmas.”
It was February.
Alexander leaned back.
He had passed that building almost every weekday.
He might have stood at the same crosswalk as Claire.
She had been close enough to see his office lights.
He didn’t know whether that made him feel betrayed or ashamed.
Probably both.
At St. Catherine’s, the emergency department refused to allow wealth, urgency, or the Blackwood name to rearrange its priorities.
Alexander was grateful for that.
A nurse took one look at the babies and called pediatrics. Another crouched beside Lily and convinced her, after several minutes, to let Alexander support Nora while Lily kept Mae.
It was the first time he held one of them.
Nora weighed almost nothing.
That was his first irrational thought.
The second was that he was going to break her.
The nurse must have seen his face.
“Support the neck.”
“I am.”
“You’re holding her like a bomb.”
“I’m aware.”
“Relax your shoulders.”
“I am relaxed.”
Marcus, standing three feet away, coughed into his fist.
Alexander looked at him.
“Something?”
“No.”
Nora moved inside the lavender blanket.
A tiny pink mouth appeared beneath the dark knit cap.
Alexander stopped listening to the room.
Her eyes opened for less than a second.
Dark blue. Unfocused.
The nurse took her gently.
“We’ll check both babies. You can come.”
Lily stepped after her.
A social worker appeared from another doorway.
“I need someone to stay with Lily for a few minutes.”
“I’m going with them,” Lily said.
“We’re all staying together,” Alexander said.
The social worker looked at him.
“And you are?”
“Alexander Blackwood.”
“That tells me your name, not your legal relationship to these children.”
He almost answered.
Father.
The word had already entered the architecture of his mind.
He stopped himself.
“I don’t know yet.”
For the first time since the street, Lily looked offended with him.
“Mom said you are.”
“I heard her.”
“Then why’d you say you don’t know?”
Alexander crouched again.
“Because your mom deserves to be here when I say what I know and what I don’t.”
Lily stared at him.
“You talk weird.”
“I’ve been told.”
“Mom says you talk like everybody is in trouble.”
Marcus turned away again.
The social worker’s mouth twitched.
Alexander sighed.
“Your mother has said many generous things about me.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
That time Marcus failed to hide the laugh.
It lasted half a second.
Lily’s expression did not change, but some of the rigid fear in her shoulders loosened.
Police arrived nine minutes later.
Detective Janine Ortiz was in plain clothes, dark wool coat unbuttoned, notebook already in hand. Her partner spoke with hospital security while she walked directly past Alexander and sat beside Lily.
She did not ask what happened first.
She asked whether Lily wanted apple juice.
Lily said no.
Ortiz asked whether she wanted water.
No.
Hot chocolate?
Lily looked suspicious.
“From where?”
“The machine downstairs, which means it’ll probably be terrible.”
Lily thought about it.
“With marshmallows?”
“I can investigate.”
Lily finally nodded.
Only then did Ortiz begin.
Alexander listened from six feet away while a nurse cleaned a shallow scrape on Lily’s palm.
The story came in pieces.
Claire had put the twins to sleep in two bassinets shortly after nine the previous night. Lily had been coloring at the kitchen table. Someone knocked.
Claire looked through the peephole.
Her face changed.
May you like
She told Lily to take the silver locket, put on her coat, and go into the hall bathroom with the babies if she heard the words “Mr. Vale.”
Lily had not understood how she was supposed to carry both.
