Chương 5
“Why?”
“Because he should have had it.”
Daniel opened his mouth and found nothing.
Claire kept speaking.
“For a while I had supervised visits. Then I moved to St. Louis for work. Mark remarried. The kids were little. His wife, Rachel, was good to them.”
“You decided that made you unnecessary?”
“I decided I was dangerous.”
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
The word came without hesitation.
Daniel looked down at his wedding ring.
“And then?”
“Then years passed.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It’s the ugliest answer because that’s what happened. Years passed. At first I told myself I was waiting until I was stable. Then I was stable and ashamed. Then every year made the previous year harder to explain.”
“So you just stayed gone.”
“Yes.”
“Until today.”
Claire inhaled.
“Emma contacted me in March.”
Daniel looked at the calendar on the wall.
March.
Five months.
“She found you?”
“She found an old obituary for my father. My name was in it. Then she found my work page.”
“And contacted you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell me?”
“No.”
“Did you tell her you were married?”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“Does she know about me?”
“Yes.”
“Does your son?”
“Yes.”
“Does your ex-husband?”
“Yes.”
Daniel laughed once.
It was a terrible sound.
“So everyone knows about me.”
“Daniel.”
“Everyone in your secret family knows about your husband, but your husband doesn’t know about your family.”
“That’s true.”
“Do you hear how insane that sounds?”
“Yes.”
“Why the photographs?”
“Emma asked.”
“Why today?”
“She’s leaving for a semester program next week. She wanted one picture of all four of us.”
“All four.”
“I know what that sounds like.”
“Do you?”
“Mark is not my husband.”
“He had his arm around you.”
“It was a photograph.”
“You hate people touching your waist in photographs.”
Claire went quiet.
Daniel regretted knowing that detail.
He hated that eight years of intimacy had become ammunition in less than a day.
“Daniel,” she said, “I should come home.”
“No.”
“We need to talk in person.”
“I don’t want you here tonight.”
“This is my home too.”
“I know.”
The phrase sounded different when he said it.
Claire heard it.
He could tell.
“I can stay here,” she said.
“Stay wherever you were planning to stay.”
“I wasn’t planning anything with Mark.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I need you to know that.”
“I don’t know what I need to know.”
He ended the call before she could say she loved him.
Then he sat at the kitchen table until the room went dark around him.
At nine, his younger brother called.
Daniel ignored it.
At nine thirty, he put the parsley in a glass of water because Claire once told him it lasted longer that way.
He stared at the glass afterward.
Then he threw the parsley in the trash.
Ten minutes later, embarrassed by the pettiness of it, he took it back out, rinsed it, and returned it to the glass.
That was the first thing he did that evening that felt entirely like himself.
The second was calling the investigator.
Her name was Lena Ortiz.
She listened, asked for legal names, approximate dates, and jurisdictions, then told Daniel she could search public records and verify the basic history without intruding on the children.
“I don’t want the kids investigated.”
“Good.”
“I mean it.”
“I heard you.”
“I want to know if Claire is still married to him. Whether there are financial connections. Property. Anything that affects me.”
“I can do lawful records work.”
“How fast?”
“I’ll tell you when I have something verified.”
Daniel nearly asked for an estimate.
He stopped himself.
“Fine.”
“And Mr. Carter?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t contact the children.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“People say that.”
“Apparently people say a lot of things before doing stupid things.”
Lena laughed softly.
“You’ve already spoken to a lawyer.”
Daniel looked toward the empty chair across from him.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He slept badly on the couch.
At four twelve in the morning, he woke from a dream in which Claire had been standing at the end of a school hallway while hundreds of children passed between them.
At six, he gave up and made coffee.
At seven seventeen, Claire texted.
I’m staying at the Langham. I won’t come home unless you ask me to. I’m sorry for the lie about Milwaukee. I’m sorry for all of it.
At seven twenty, another message appeared.
Emma knows you saw the picture.
Daniel stared at that one.
Then:
She wants to talk to you someday. I told her that’s not her decision to make right now.
He set down the phone.
The girl was sixteen.
Sixteen-year-olds should not have to think about whether their mother’s husband wanted to meet them.
He hated Claire for putting the girl in that position.
Then, because emotions were apparently determined to humiliate him, he felt sorry for Claire.
He imagined being twenty-eight, newly sober, divorced, ashamed, watching another woman raise your children.
Then he remembered Claire sitting across from him on their fourth date saying she would never be a mother.
Sympathy vanished.
At eight fifteen, Daniel showered and went to work.
His office occupied the eleventh floor of a building downtown. By nine, he was in a meeting about a suburban medical office portfolio while two associates debated parking ratios.
Daniel contributed three sentences.
After the meeting, his colleague Aaron Brooks followed him into the hallway.
“You dying?”
“No.”
“Divorce?”
Daniel stopped walking.
Aaron raised both hands.
“Wow. Lucky guess.”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry.”
Daniel entered his office.
Aaron followed because they had known each other fifteen years and boundaries had never been his best quality.
“Do you need something covered?”
“No.”
“You look like you slept under a bridge.”
“I slept on a sofa that cost four thousand dollars. I’m fine.”
“That sofa is terrible.”
Daniel almost smiled.
Aaron leaned against the doorframe.
“Want me to leave?”
“Yes.”
Aaron nodded.
Then he left.
May you like
Daniel appreciated him for that more than he could say.
At ten forty-three, Lena Ortiz called.
