Chương 2
Claire hesitated.
Victoria stepped in.
“She told us.”
Adrian looked at her.
“Us.”
Victoria’s posture remained straight, but Claire saw the small movement at her throat when she swallowed.
“Natalie told me before Ethan died that there was a possibility the baby was his.”
“A possibility.”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing.”
“She didn’t know.”
“You just said she knew.”
“She suspected before he died. She had confirmation afterward.”
Claire stared at Victoria.
That was the first thing Victoria had said that Claire had not known.
Adrian gave a short, humorless breath.
“Wonderful. We’re doing distinctions now.”
The baby made a soft complaining sound.
All three adults stopped.
Claire looked down. His face had tightened, eyes still closed, mouth searching against the edge of the blanket.
“He needs to eat,” she said.
Adrian blinked.
The sentence seemed almost offensive in its ordinariness.
Claire glanced at the small clock above the shelving.
“Natalie fed him a little after three. It’s after six.”
Adrian looked from the clock to the child.
For six days there had always been someone around the baby who knew what came next. Natalie. The postpartum nurse. Claire. Even Mrs. Alvarez, who had run the Cole household for nineteen years and could identify a hungry newborn from two rooms away.
The nurse had been dismissed that morning.
Mrs. Alvarez had taken her sister to an oncology appointment in Stamford.
Natalie had left.
Claire had been told to keep the baby with her “for a little while.”
Now Adrian stood in a linen room with the legal document that could erase the meaning of every congratulation he had received since Tuesday.
Still, the child was hungry.
Claire watched that fact reach him.
“Where’s the formula?” he asked.
“In the nursery refrigerator.”
“He’s breast-fed.”
“Natalie pumped.”
Adrian’s face tightened again at his wife’s name.
Claire shifted the baby higher.
“I can take him up.”
“No.”
“Then you take him.”
He stared at her.
She could see that he wanted to say something devastating. Something final.
Instead he held out his arms.
They were wrong.
Too straight, too stiff, like someone expecting a box.
Claire almost laughed, and the fact that she almost laughed terrified her.
“Bend your elbow.”
His eyes lifted to hers.
“If you want his head to stay attached, bend your elbow.”
Victoria made a small sound that might have been a breath.
Adrian bent his elbow.
Claire placed the baby against him carefully.
For all his stiffness, his hands were gentle.
The baby settled against the black shirt beneath Adrian’s open suit jacket. His fist opened once against Adrian’s chest, then closed.
Adrian looked down.
Something happened in his face that Claire wished she had not seen.
It was easier when rich people were only employers.
It was easier when they stayed behind the clean boundaries of payroll, instructions, doors you knocked on before entering.
Adrian’s thumb moved once across the edge of the blanket.
Then he looked up.
“Get the bottle.”
Claire did.
No one mentioned the envelope again until the baby had taken two ounces and fallen asleep against Adrian’s chest.
They moved to Adrian’s study because Claire refused to discuss the situation in the nursery.
She did not say why.
The room had been prepared for a son.
There was a pale blue chair beside the window, a bassinet beside Natalie’s side of the bed, unopened boxes of diapers stacked beneath a console, and a framed black-and-white photograph of Adrian holding the baby in the hospital.
Claire could not look at it now.
The study was safer.
Adrian sat behind his desk with the baby in one arm, though Claire had offered three times to take him. Victoria sat across from him. Claire remained standing.
The sealed envelope lay between them.
Adrian looked at it for a long time.
Then he slid it toward Victoria.
“Open it.”
Victoria did not move.
“It isn’t mine.”
“Apparently nothing in this house is.”
Claire looked at the floor.
Adrian’s gaze found her immediately.
“You can leave.”
Claire stayed where she was.
He waited.
She said, “I think I should be here.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m already in it.”
“That is the first accurate thing anyone has said tonight.”
Victoria turned toward him.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Use her because you don’t want to say what you want to say to me.”
Adrian’s mouth twitched.
“You’ve been quiet for eleven weeks, Victoria. You don’t get to manage the conversation now.”
Victoria stared at him.
Claire expected one of them to raise their voice.
Neither did.
The baby breathed softly against Adrian’s shirt.
Finally Victoria picked up the envelope.
She broke the seal.
Inside were seven pages.
The first was a cover letter from a private accredited laboratory in Massachusetts. Claire watched Victoria read the heading, then the date, then the names.
Natalie Cole.
Ethan Cole.
Fetal sample identifier.
Victoria stopped.
Adrian noticed.
“Read it.”
Victoria continued.
Claire watched the color leave what remained in her face.
Adrian shifted the sleeping child slightly.
“Victoria.”
“The probability listed is greater than ninety-nine point nine percent.”
His eyes did not move.
“Of what?”
She looked at him.
“That Ethan was the biological father.”
Adrian sat completely still.
Claire became aware of the air-conditioning.
The faint hum of the lamp.
A lawn mower somewhere far beyond the study windows, one of the grounds crew finishing before dark.
Adrian looked down at the baby.
The silver bracelet caught the lamplight.
COLE.
The name remained correct.
Only the meaning had changed.
“When was the sample collected?” he asked.
Victoria checked the report.
“April twenty-sixth.”
Ethan had died May twenty-third.
Adrian knew the date without asking.
Everyone in the house did.
Ethan had collapsed at a restaurant in Manhattan during a late lunch with two colleagues. An undiagnosed defect in his heart had ruptured before the ambulance reached the hospital. There had been no accident, no mystery, no dramatic last phone call.
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One moment he had been complaining that the restaurant put fennel in everything.
Forty minutes later, he was dead.
