Chương 7
“When your mother says it is safe for you,” he said.
Ethan rolled his eyes.
It was such an ordinary, disrespectful child’s gesture that Daniel nearly smiled.
Then Ethan said, “You only say what she lets you.”
Daniel’s expression sobered.
“Today I do.”
“Why?”
“Because she is the parent who has taken care of you.”
That answer satisfied Ethan enough that he looked away.
Daniel removed a card from his pocket and placed it on the table.
“My private number is there.”
Kesha said, “All contact goes through counsel.”
“Then give it to counsel.”
He left without trying to touch any of them.
The storm continued through the afternoon.
Harriet did not visit.
At four, the estate manager delivered dinner on a rolling cart and apologized for the inconvenience as though the Reynolds family had accidentally scheduled plumbing work. At six, the road reopened for vehicles with chains. Lena arranged a state transport van, because the helicopter remained grounded.
Before they left, Olivia discovered a row of framed photographs in the guesthouse hallway.
Daniel appeared in most of them.
Daniel at twelve, missing a front tooth.
Daniel at seventeen, holding a track trophy.
Daniel at twenty-four beside his father in matching formal uniforms.
The children gathered around the photographs.
Sophia pointed. “That’s Noah’s smile.”
“No,” Noah said. “He has mine.”
Ethan stood slightly apart.
Kesha lifted Olivia’s coat from the hook.
“Time to go.”
Olivia did not move. She studied a photograph of Daniel sitting on a dock, his trousers rolled to the knee, laughing at someone outside the frame.
“He looks nice there,” she said.
Kesha buttoned the girl’s coat.
“People can look nice in photographs.”
“Was he nice when you knew him?”
The other children turned toward her.
Kesha considered giving them the easy answer. Sometimes. Before. It was complicated.
Instead she looked at the young man in the photograph.
“Yes,” she said. “He was.”
The children carried that answer into the snow.
By the time they reached their home in Colorado Springs, two satellite trucks were parked across the street.
Kesha told the driver to continue past.
The children pressed close to the dark windows.
“What are they doing?” Sophia asked.
“Waiting for Mama,” Lena said.
“Why?”
“Because adults are nosy.”
Kesha directed the driver to a secure lodging facility used for displaced officials and protected witnesses. It was not secret, but the entrance could not be filmed from the road.
The apartment had beige walls, industrial carpet, and a refrigerator that hummed loudly enough to irritate Ethan. The children complained about sharing beds. Noah wanted to know whether the building had room service. Sophia found an old deck of cards with forty-nine cards.
Their irritation relieved Kesha.
Children who argued over blankets were not yet destroyed.
After they slept, she sat at the small kitchen table with Lena.
Her phone contained seventy-three missed calls, eleven messages from reporters, four from the state director’s office, and one from an unknown number.
The unknown message read:
I signed for your letter. Daniel never saw it. We need to speak before he destroys this family.
Kesha showed Lena.
“Harriet?” Lena asked.
“Has to be.”
“Do not answer.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You are staring at the reply field.”
Kesha locked the phone.
Lena poured instant coffee into two paper cups. “You’re going to be disciplined.”
“I know.”
“You might lose command.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that as if knowledge is penance.”
Kesha looked at her.
Lena’s eyes were tired. She had been awake since three in the morning, yet her dark hair remained in the same practical bun.
“You wanted him to feel exposed,” Lena said. “He does. Now the children are exposed too.”
“I admitted it was wrong.”
“To them. Good. What are you going to do about it?”
Kesha folded the paper sleeve from her coffee into a narrow strip.
“Protect them.”
“That is a mission statement, not a plan.”
“Legal filing. Privacy injunction if counsel thinks it’s viable. School security. No public comments. Family therapy.”
“And Daniel?”
Kesha folded the strip again.
“DNA testing.”
“That is procedure. I asked about Daniel.”
“He can follow procedure.”
Lena leaned back.
“You are allowed to hate him.”
“I don’t hate him.”
“That may be the problem.”
Kesha looked down at the folded paper.
There had been years when she hated Daniel easily. Hatred had been useful during night feedings, hospital bills, promotions she nearly lost because all four children had the flu at once. It had carried grocery bags upstairs and signed school forms and sat beside a pediatric intensive-care crib when Ethan could not breathe.
Hatred had become less useful when the children began asking questions.
She had stopped hating Daniel sometime before their seventh birthday.
What remained was worse: a private tenderness she regarded as a defect, surrounded by anger and hardened with shame.
“I don’t know him,” she said.
Lena nodded. “That is closer.”
Across town, Daniel sat in his mother’s study with the sealed court petition open before him.
Harriet stood near the window. She had changed into a dark robe, but the pearls remained at her throat.
“You must not agree to anything until paternity is confirmed,” she said.
Daniel read the children’s names again.
Noah James Reynolds.
Ethan Michael Reynolds.
Sophia Grace Reynolds.
Olivia Anne Reynolds.
Their dates of birth were identical.
He remembered the call from Kesha in the parking garage. She had spoken too quickly.
There are four.
He had believed she meant four possibilities on a test, four appointments, four something. When she clarified, he had laughed because terror sometimes entered his body wearing the wrong face.
His father had been dead forty-one days.
The command review into his father’s procurement decisions had begun the same week. Reporters waited outside the estate. Daniel had been preparing to leave for a training course that could determine his next promotion.
May you like
He had told Kesha he needed time.
She had said, “You have until tomorrow to decide whether I am alone in this.”
