Chương 8
Ethan watched Noah crash the truck into a chair.
“What if she leaves again?”
“Then that tells you something too.”
Ethan hated that answer because it was true.
At eleven twenty, Deputy Harper returned.
“We found her.”
Ethan stood so fast his knee struck the coffee table.
Noah looked up.
“Where?”
“Small motel near the east highway.”
“Is she there?”
“Yes.”
“Did she run?”
“No.”
That answer frightened him in a new way.
“What did she say?”
“That she wants to speak with you.”
Noah had risen from the carpet.
Ethan saw him listening.
“Not here.”
Harper understood.
They moved into a reading room.
“She surrendered the identification she was using. She has asked for an attorney. We have contacted investigators in the county where the original crash was reported.”
“Can I see her?”
“I can’t arrange a private meeting between parties in an active investigation.”
“I’m not a party.”
Harper gave him a look.
“You are several kinds of party.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
“She has asked whether Noah is safe.”
Ethan’s face changed.
Harper noticed.
“I’m just relaying it.”
“Did she ask to see him?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Harper nodded.
“No one is suggesting otherwise.”
Ethan looked through the open doorway at his son.
Noah had gone back to the truck.
“Does she look like her?”
The question sounded ridiculous.
Harper did not make him feel ridiculous for asking.
“Yes.”
That was the first moment Ethan cried.
Not dramatically.
His face simply folded.
He turned away, pressed one hand over his eyes, and stayed like that while Harper stood quietly behind him.
Three years of grief had taught him how to cry without noise.
That skill returned immediately.
Noah saw anyway.
Children usually did.
He came into the room carrying the truck.
“Dad?”
Ethan wiped his face.
“Hey.”
“Are you sad?”
“Yeah.”
“Because Mom’s alive?”
Ethan crouched.
“I think so.”
Noah considered that with the seriousness of a person who had recently discovered adults could lie about death.
“Are you happy?”
“I think so.”
Noah frowned.
“You can’t be both.”
“You can.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
Noah accepted this more easily than Ethan had.
They stayed at the resort another night because investigators asked them not to leave the county and because Ethan could not imagine taking Noah home yet.
Home contained Victoria.
Her clothes, her toothbrush, her shoes, her books arranged by height because arranging them alphabetically irritated her.
It contained Mara too.
Not physically, but in the architecture.
The mudroom hooks she had chosen.
The dent in the kitchen floor from dropping a cast-iron pan.
Pencil marks inside a pantry door measuring Noah until age three.
That house was suddenly crowded with absent women.
Ethan requested a different suite.
The new one overlooked the parking lot instead of the forest.
Noah preferred it.
“You can see the snowplow.”
They watched the plow make slow orange passes under the lights.
At six that evening, Daniel arrived.
He hugged Ethan once, awkwardly, then handed Noah a plastic bag of gummy worms.
“I was told these were medicinal.”
Noah looked at Ethan.
“Are they?”
“Extremely.”
Daniel sat in the armchair and removed his glasses.
“I spoke with family counsel.”
Ethan’s stomach tightened.
“Don’t.”
“We have to.”
“Not in front of him.”
Noah was on the floor watching a cartoon with headphones.
Daniel lowered his voice.
“Your legal status as Noah’s father is strong. Nobody is changing anything casually. Mara’s disappearance complicates custody, but she cannot simply return and resume parental rights as if she went on vacation.”
“She abandoned him.”
“Yes.”
“She committed fraud.”
“Likely.”
“She let him think she was dead.”
“Yes.”
Ethan looked toward Noah.
Daniel leaned forward.
“Biology and parenthood are not the same legal question.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Ethan glared at him.
Daniel held up both hands.
“Fine.”
They sat quietly.
After a while Daniel said, “Victoria was released pending further investigation.”
Ethan looked over.
“What?”
“Child confinement charges may come quickly. The old crash case is more complicated. Prosecutors will need evidence of what she actually did.”
“She admitted it.”
“To you.”
“And hotel security.”
“Good. That helps.”
“I want her out of the house.”
“I have already arranged for an attorney to handle temporary possession and protective-order options.”
Ethan rubbed his forehead.
“Thank you.”
Daniel watched him.
“You need to decide whether you want contact with Mara through counsel.”
“I want to see her.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I know.”
“What do you want afterward?”
Ethan looked toward the window.
The snowplow turned at the end of the lot.
“I have no idea.”
The next morning Mara’s attorney contacted Daniel.
She offered a meeting.
No Noah.
No recording.
Attorneys present.
Ethan agreed to the first two and refused the third.
“I’m not sitting with her while four lawyers listen.”
Daniel said, “One lawyer.”
“No.”
In the end, the meeting took place in a small conference room at the sheriff’s office with Daniel waiting outside and Mara’s attorney doing the same.
Ethan arrived first.
He sat for nine minutes staring at a box of tissues placed in the middle of the table.
Someone had selected a brand with flowers printed on the cardboard.
He hated the flowers.
When the door opened, Ethan looked up.
Mara entered.
For three years he had imagined this moment in impossible forms without admitting he imagined it at all.
He had pictured her walking through the grocery store.
Standing on the far side of a traffic light.
Calling his name at an airport.
He had once followed a woman with similar hair through a Target until she turned around.
The real Mara looked smaller.
Her dark hair was shorter, cut just below her jaw. She wore jeans, brown boots, and a gray sweater with one sleeve pulled over her hand. There were lines beside her mouth that had not been there before.
Her left little finger was still crooked.
Ethan stared at it.
Mara sat across from him.
“Hi.”
May you like
He almost left.
Of every possible first word, she had chosen hi.
