Chương 4
“Why didn’t you call me?”
Sophie looked irritated now, which Nathan found almost reassuring.
“I did.”
“You did?”
“You said it was the tree.”
He remembered.
She had come into his bedroom sometime after midnight and told him there was scratching in the wall. Nathan had been awake until one finishing a bid for a renovation job. He had checked beneath her bed because that was what she meant by check, listened for maybe ten seconds, heard branches brushing siding in the wind, and told her it was the tree.
He had kissed her forehead.
He had gone back to sleep.
Nathan sat down again.
Sophie watched him.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You look weird.”
“I feel weird.”
“Are you gonna throw up?”
“No.”
“You look like when you got food poisoning.”
Despite everything, he laughed once.
It came out wrong.
Sophie smiled anyway.
Then she asked, “Was she here when we were sleeping?”
Nathan looked toward the scraped window frame.
“I think maybe she was.”
Sophie stopped smiling.
He hated the truth.
He hated the lie more.
By Monday, every exterior lock had been replaced. Window sensors had been installed. A camera covered the front walk, another the driveway, another the backyard. Nathan knew cameras did not create safety; they created records. Still, he needed records.
He also stopped letting Sophie walk from her classroom to the pickup line without him standing where she could see him.
The first day, she accepted it.
The second day, she looked embarrassed.
By the fourth, she said, “You don’t have to stand right there.”
“Right where?”
“Like right there.”
“I’m in the parent area.”
“You’re in the front.”
“There’s no award for being in the back.”
“Everybody can see you.”
“Good.”
She frowned.
Nathan heard himself.
That evening, Sophie ate six peas individually while he answered a work email at the table.
“You said no phones at dinner,” she said.
Nathan put it facedown.
“You’re right.”
“You keep saying I’m right now.”
“That bothering you?”
“It’s weird.”
“Enjoy it. Could be temporary.”
She ate another pea.
A quiet minute passed.
Then Sophie said, “Grandma Margaret said Mom knew.”
Nathan’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth.
He set it down.
“About what?”
“That she wasn’t dead.”
There it was.
The thing Margaret had dropped before leaving.
Nathan tried to keep his face neutral.
“Did she say when?”
“No.”
“Did she show you anything?”
Sophie shook her head.
“She said you didn’t know everything about Mom.”
“That sounds like something she’d say.”
“Is it true?”
Nathan stared at his plate.
There were adult answers and there were honest answers and, occasionally, they were the same thing.
“Probably.”
Sophie looked surprised.
“You don’t know everything about somebody just because you love them.”
“Did Mom lie to you?”
He considered denying it.
Instead he said, “Sometimes.”
“About big stuff?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Sophie pushed the final pea around her plate.
Nathan wanted to take the sentence back. He wanted Julia restored to the simple shape he had maintained for Sophie: kind, funny, impatient with slow drivers, terrible at folding fitted sheets, brave at the hospital, dead too young.
But simple shapes were starting to look dangerous.
At 9:14 that night, Nathan’s phone rang from a blocked number.
He let it ring twice before answering.
He said nothing.
Margaret breathed first.
“Nathan.”
He looked toward the hallway. Sophie was in bed. Her door was open.
“I was told not to speak to you.”
“And yet you answered.”
“I wanted to know if it was you.”
“It’s me.”
“You have ten seconds.”
“Julia knew I was alive.”
Nathan closed his eyes.
“Nine.”
“She contacted me.”
“Eight.”
“She came to see me.”
“Seven.”
“She forgave me.”
“Six.”
“She asked me to stay away because you couldn’t handle it.”
Nathan opened his eyes.
“Five.”
“I have proof.”
“Four.”
“She was planning to tell you.”
“Three.”
“You’re making the same mistake now that you made with her.”
“Two.”
“You think protection means deciding what everyone else is allowed to know.”
The sentence landed where Margaret intended.
Nathan ended the call.
His hand was shaking.
Five seconds later, a message arrived from an unknown number.
A photograph.
Julia stood beside Margaret in the lobby of a hotel.
Alive.
Both of them.
Julia looked about thirty-four. Her hair was shorter than it had been near the end of her life. She wore the green winter coat Nathan remembered buying her after she complained for three weeks that every warm coat made her look like a sleeping bag.
Margaret stood beside her in sunglasses.
Julia was not smiling.
But she was there.
Nathan sat down on the edge of his bed.
The photograph might have been fake. He knew that. Images could be altered. Metadata could be wrong. Dates could be changed.
Still, he recognized Julia’s right hand.
Most people would not have noticed anything about it. Nathan did.
Her middle finger bent slightly inward from a childhood break that had never been set properly.
He zoomed in.
The finger bent.
He put the phone down.
Then picked it up again.
For nearly fifteen minutes he did nothing useful.
Finally he walked to the hall closet where he kept the plastic storage bin containing Julia’s laptop, old phone, notebooks, insurance papers, and the ugly ceramic bowl Sophie had made at preschool and insisted belonged with “Mom’s important stuff.”
He had not opened the bin in almost a year.
The lid snapped loudly enough that he looked toward Sophie’s room.
No movement.
Julia’s laptop was wrapped in one of Nathan’s old T-shirts.
He carried it to the kitchen.
The battery was dead.
He found the charger beneath a stack of manuals and plugged it in.
When the login screen appeared, he stared at the password field.
He knew her password.
May you like
That was part of what made entering it feel worse.
Nathan had gone through Julia’s phone after the hospital because someone had to cancel subscriptions, answer relatives, find billing accounts, notify the school, locate the password to the utilities. Grief had been administrative for a long time.
