Part 10
“Did he give you the watch?” Adrian asked.
Jamie did not answer.
A long black sedan stopped across the street. Two photographers emerged, one fastening a rain cover around his camera.
Nora saw them first.
“We have to move now.”
Jamie looked toward the photographers.
One raised his camera.
Adrian stepped directly in front of Jamie.
The shutter began clicking.
“Get in the station,” Nora said.
“I’m not going with you,” Jamie replied.
“You do not have to. Walk through the main hall and leave through any exit you choose. We will not follow.”
Another photographer arrived from the corner.
Lydia looked at Jamie. “Go.”
He stared at her.
“Please,” she said. “They are here because of me.”
The first photographer called Lydia’s name.
“Ms. Marlowe! Who is the young man?”
A commuter stopped. Then another.
Adrian spread his arms slightly, blocking the cameras without touching anyone.
“Back up,” he said.
The photographer ignored him. “Adrian, is this your brother?”
The question transformed the pavement.
Jamie recoiled as though someone had struck him.
Lydia stepped between the camera and both young men.
“No photographs,” she said.
“Ms. Marlowe, can you confirm—”
“No.”
The photographer continued shooting.
Nora raised the umbrella she had given Jamie, angling it across the line of sight. Jamie held it automatically as she guided the edge without touching him.
Station security reappeared, this time with two additional officers.
“Clear the entrance,” one called.
The crowd shifted but did not disperse.
Jamie looked trapped.
Lydia recognized the expression. She had seen it once in Adrian at age nine when an elevator stalled between floors. He had not cried or shouted. He had stared at the sealed doors as if all the air belonged on the other side.
“There,” she said, pointing toward a service passage beside the terminal. “That leads to the taxi court.”
Jamie looked at the passage, then at her.
“Go,” Lydia repeated. “No one will stop you.”
He moved.
The photographers followed.
Adrian stepped into their path. One camera struck his shoulder.
“Watch it,” the photographer said.
Adrian laughed in disbelief. “You hit me.”
“You moved into me.”
Nora took out her phone. “Station security, now.”
The officers approached, telling the photographers to step back.
Jamie reached the service passage, then stopped.
The card remained on the stone ledge.
He looked toward it.
Lydia saw the decision pass through him.
For a moment she believed he would leave it. Perhaps that was best. The card would be soaked, thrown away, forgotten. He could disappear into the city, and Lydia would keep her promise while the rest of her life narrowed around the knowledge that he existed somewhere beyond her reach.
Jamie turned back.
The crowd noticed and raised phones.
He walked to the ledge, keeping the umbrella low. The coffee cup had tipped in the confusion, spilling a brown stream along the stone. Lydia’s card lay near it, one edge stained.
Jamie picked it up.
He looked at Lydia.
The noise around them became strangely distant.
“You put the watch beside him?” he asked.
Lydia’s face went still.
Adrian turned.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?”
“I wanted him to have something that belonged to both boys.”
Jamie looked at Adrian.
“Both initials,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So it wasn’t only his.”
“No.”
“Then why did he have it?”
“Adrian was with me. Julian had been taken for an examination. I placed it beside his bassinet so I would remember to take a photograph when they brought him back.”
Jamie rubbed his thumb over the damp card.
“They never brought him back?”
Lydia swallowed. “The alarms started first.”
A photographer shouted another question.
Jamie’s eyes remained on her.
“What happened after that?”
Lydia’s body remembered smoke before her mind formed the words. Her hand tightened around the sunglasses she still held.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You must know something.”
“I know what people told me. I know what records were missing. I know three infants were moved through a service stairwell and only two were documented at the evacuation site. I know a nurse remembered seeing a man carry a covered bassinet toward an ambulance that did not belong to the hospital.”
“Who was the man?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did anyone look for him?”
“For years.”
“Police?”
“Yes.”
“Private investigators?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Nothing that held.”
Jamie looked at the watch pocket.
“James worked in hospital maintenance.”
The sentence was quiet enough that only the four of them heard it.
Lydia’s heart struck once, hard.
“Which hospital?” Adrian asked.
Jamie turned toward him.
Adrian’s face held no strategy now, only fear.
“I don’t know,” Jamie said.
“You said he raised you.”
“He didn’t talk about before.”
“Before what?”
“Before me.”
“Did he ever mention Boston?”
“No.”
“An evacuation?”
“No.”
“A woman named Lydia?”
“No.”
“Did he know about the photograph?”
Jamie looked down.
The answer existed in the silence.
Lydia spoke gently. “He did.”
Jamie’s jaw tightened.
“He kept it hidden,” Jamie said. “The watch too. I found them after he died.”
“In his belongings?”
“In a locked box.”
“What else was inside?”
He looked at Lydia with sudden anger. “You don’t get all of it.”
“You’re right.”
“He raised me.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
Lydia accepted the blow without defending herself.
Jamie stepped closer for the first time, though several feet still separated them.
“He fed me. Taught me to read. Taught me to fix things. Slept in a chair beside me when I had pneumonia because we couldn’t afford the hospital bill. He worked nights and lied about eating so I could. Whatever you think he did, he was my father.”
Lydia’s grief collided with something more complicated.
James Vale might have stolen her child.
James Vale might also have saved him.
May you like
Both could be true. Neither could be true. The man was dead and unavailable to answer. Jamie stood before her defending the only father he had known against a history that had arrived without warning.
“I will not take that from you,” Lydia said.
