Part 4
Lydia’s hand rose, but she did not touch her son.
Adrian had not planned what to say next. The absence showed in his face. He looked at the stranger’s hair, the watch chain, the familiar eyes. His confidence abandoned him in pieces.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
The stranger’s mouth shifted, not quite a smile.
“You tell me.”
The answer could have been suspicious, defensive, or merely tired. Adrian heard all three.
“What’s your name?”
The stranger looked toward Lydia again.
She stood in her camel coat with her sunglasses held at her side. Without them, she seemed less protected but not more approachable. Her face carried the habits of wealth: stillness, expectation, the assumption that strangers would understand what she required. Yet her eyes had filled, and the gloved hand near her chest trembled once before she closed it.
The young man saw the tremor.
His own fingers tightened around the chain.
“Why?” he asked.
Adrian glanced at Lydia.
She did not answer for him.
“I just…” Adrian started. “You look like someone.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
The stranger studied him more carefully.
A bus pulled into the terminal lane, blocking part of the view with a sheet of dirty windows. Passengers inside turned their heads idly toward the four people standing on the pavement. Lydia became aware of them and then ashamed of being aware.
The stranger touched the white streak above his temple.
Adrian mirrored the motion without realizing it.
For one impossible instant, they looked like a man and his reflection separated by glass.
The bus rolled forward.
The stranger’s hand dropped.
“People have said worse,” he replied.
Adrian almost laughed. The sound caught before it escaped.
“What happened to the watch?” he asked.
The stranger’s face closed.
“What watch?”
“The one in your hand.”
“It’s mine.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t.”
“You were all staring at it.”
Lydia found her voice. “We didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
He looked at her coat, the waiting driver, the open car door. “Sure.”
The single word carried no anger. That made Lydia feel its judgment more clearly.
Nora stepped back, preserving the distance she had promised not to cross. Her phone remained at her side.
“We should go,” she said to Lydia, though she watched the stranger.
Adrian turned sharply. “No.”
The stranger’s eyes moved among them. “I’m not asking you to stay.”
Adrian flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
“No,” the stranger said. “I probably don’t.”
He began to walk toward the terminal doors.
Lydia took a step.
Her heel struck a shallow crack in the pavement. Nora’s hand came near her elbow but stopped before contact.
The stranger heard the movement and turned.
The watch chain still hung from his fingers. The case had slipped partly from his sweater, exposing the engraved back. A and J. The flawed J leaning left.
Lydia could see it now without doubt.
Her face changed.
Years of discipline failed quietly. Her lips parted. Her chin tightened, then lost its strength. She raised her hand to cover her mouth, but the gesture did not contain what had already appeared in her eyes.
The stranger watched her.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
Traffic moved behind him. A horn sounded. Someone dragged a suitcase over the grooves in the pavement. The station clock continued its steady mechanical progress.
He looked down at the watch, then back at Lydia.
“Why?”
“Please.”
The word did not belong to her usual vocabulary. Lydia made requests that sounded like decisions. She negotiated. She instructed. She rarely pleaded, and never in public.
Adrian turned toward her, startled by the nakedness of it.
The stranger noticed too.
He did not leave.
Lydia drew a breath that shook near the end. “The photograph inside it.”
His caution sharpened.
“You saw it?”
“When you opened the lid.”
“So you were watching me.”
“Yes.”
The honesty seemed to unsettle him more than denial would have.
He pulled the watch fully from his sweater and enclosed it in his fist. “It’s not for sale.”
“I don’t want to buy it.”
“People always say that before they name a price.”
“I’m not trying to take it from you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
Lydia’s answer rose too quickly and died before reaching her mouth.
Her son.
The word would have been an assault. She knew it. The young man had not given his name. He had not agreed to their questions. He might have stolen the watch, found it, inherited it, bought it from someone who had. Resemblance was not proof. Grief had made Lydia believe impossible things before.
For years after the evacuation, she had seen Julian in airports, playgrounds, grocery stores. Every dark-haired boy of the right age became a possibility until he turned, spoke, or reached for another woman. Once, when Adrian was four, Lydia followed a family through a museum because their younger son had a white streak above his temple. She followed them for twenty minutes. The boy was seven.
Her husband found her near the Egyptian galleries and told her she was frightening people.
She had hated him for being correct.
Now the same danger stood before her, except the young man had Adrian’s face and the watch she had left beside Julian’s bassinet.
Lydia lowered her hand.
“I knew the woman in the photograph,” she said.
The stranger stared.
Adrian’s head turned toward her. Nora closed her eyes briefly, as though she had hoped for a gentler opening.
The young man’s grip tightened around the watch. “How?”
Lydia could not say it.
A station announcement sounded from overhead speakers, distorted by the open doors. The stranger waited while an arriving train was assigned a platform. Lydia listened to every word without understanding any of them.
“How did you know her?” he repeated.
“She…” Lydia began.
Her throat closed.
Adrian stepped nearer to his mother, not the stranger. “That’s her.”
May you like
The young man looked at him.
“In the photograph,” Adrian said. “The woman is my mother.”
