Chương 3
“You did then.”
“I said I didn’t know.”
“You called me unstable.”
Margaret’s face tightened.
“I should not have used that word.”
“No. You probably shouldn’t have.”
Ethan put his briefcase down again.
He no longer trusted himself to hold it.
“What happened?”
Neither woman answered.
“Somebody is going to tell me.”
Claire looked at the departure board.
The next New York train was after five in the morning.
She exhaled through her nose.
“Fine.”
She sat.
Margaret remained standing.
Ethan did too.
Claire glanced at him.
“You’re making me feel like I’m being deposed.”
He sat at the far end of the bench.
Margaret sat between them.
Claire looked at that arrangement and almost smiled again.
“Perfect.”
Margaret stood back up.
“All right.”
She moved to the opposite bench.
Ethan might have found the awkwardness funny once.
Tonight it only made the silence more human.
Claire took a bottle from the diaper bag and checked it.
“Seven months ago,” she said, “I called you.”
“I know.”
“Twelve times.”
“I know.”
“I left messages.”
“You said you needed to talk.”
“I wasn’t going to leave ‘I’m pregnant’ on voicemail.”
He rubbed his jaw.
“Okay.”
“You blocked me.”
“Because you came to my office.”
“Because you blocked me.”
“I blocked you after the office.”
“Your assistant stopped putting my calls through before the office.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“She said it was.”
Ethan stopped.
His assistant at the time had been his father’s executive assistant before becoming his.
Margaret looked at the floor.
Claire noticed.
“So I called your mother,” she continued. “She agreed to meet me.”
“Where?”
“Café near Copley.”
Ethan looked at Margaret.
She nodded.
“I told her I was pregnant. She asked how sure I was that you were the father.”
Ethan closed his eyes.
“Mom.”
“I had reasons.”
“You had assumptions.”
Margaret’s voice sharpened. “I had watched the two of you destroy each other for almost a year.”
“That gave you the right to decide whether I knew I had children?”
“No.”
The answer came so quickly that Ethan opened his eyes.
Margaret looked at him.
“No,” she repeated. “It did not.”
Claire seemed surprised too.
Margaret folded her gloves in her lap.
“At the time, I believed I was protecting you.”
“From my children?”
“From Claire.”
Claire looked away.
Margaret continued before Ethan could speak.
“Your father was dying. You were sleeping four hours a night. The acquisition was collapsing. You and Claire had spent months breaking up and getting back together, and every time you did, you were both worse afterward.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No. It’s the reason. There’s a difference.”
Ethan stood.
He walked three paces away, stopped, then returned because anything farther felt like abandonment.
“What did you tell her?”
Margaret looked at Claire.
Claire answered.
“She told me you knew.”
Ethan went still.
“She told me she had told you. She said you didn’t want involvement unless a paternity test proved the baby was yours.”
“Babies,” Margaret said quietly.
Claire’s expression became cold.
“You didn’t know that part yet.”
Margaret nodded.
“No.”
Ethan stared at his mother.
“You told her that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Margaret’s composure finally cracked.
“Because your father asked me to.”
Claire looked up.
Ethan said nothing.
Margaret rubbed one thumb across the seam of her glove.
“Your father knew Claire had contacted me. He saw the message on my phone. I told him what she said.”
“And he told you to lie?”
“He told me not to let you be pulled back into the relationship until we knew whether the child was yours.”
Claire’s voice was flat. “He called me a trap.”
Margaret closed her eyes.
“He was frightened.”
“He was cruel.”
“Yes.”
The word remained between them.
Ethan thought of his father in the last months of his life: thinner, impatient, furious at weakness, still taking calls from the hospital, still correcting Ethan’s tie before board meetings.
Richard Cole had been dead five months.
Ethan had spent most of those months turning the man into something easier to mourn.
The dead benefited from editing.
“So Dad knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody told me.”
Margaret looked directly at him.
“You made that easier than you want to admit.”
The accusation landed because it was true enough to hurt.
Ethan looked at Claire.
She did not rescue him from it.
He had blocked her.
He had told the doorman not to let her upstairs.
He had instructed his office that he would not take personal calls from her.
He had been angry, exhausted, and convinced that Claire would eventually force him into another round of a relationship neither of them knew how to survive.
He had built walls.
His parents had decided what to hide behind them.
One of the babies stirred.
Claire leaned down.
Nora opened her eyes.
They were gray-blue in the amber station light.
Ethan’s father had had gray eyes.
So did millions of other people.
Nora stared at him without interest.
Then she sneezed.
Margaret laughed.
She covered her mouth immediately.
Claire looked at her.
For a second, the tension broke.
“My God,” Margaret whispered.
“What?” Ethan asked.
“You did that.”
“What?”
“As a baby. Every time you sneezed, you looked offended afterward.”
Claire looked at Nora.
The baby did, in fact, look offended.
“Don’t,” Claire said.
Margaret’s smile vanished.
“You’re right.”
Claire lifted Nora from the carrier.
Ethan watched the practiced sequence: one hand behind the neck, the other under the body, blanket caught with two fingers before it slipped.
Nora settled against Claire’s chest.
“You said you tried to tell me,” Ethan said.
Claire closed her eyes briefly.
“We’re still doing this?”
“Yes.”
“I’m tired.”
“So am I.”
She looked at his suit.
“No offense, Ethan, but I’m guessing our definitions have diverged.”
He almost defended himself.
Then he saw the dried formula on her sleeve.
He shut his mouth.
Claire noticed.
“Good choice.”
Margaret looked toward the station entrance.
“There’s a hotel across the street.”
May you like
“No,” Claire said.
“You need somewhere warm until morning.”
