"A little boy. Seven years old. Who has been walking around Portland for four months with no mother and a photograph of — " Derek sat back. "Does your mum know?"
"No." Nathan turned his beer bottle in a slow circle on the table. "Nobody knows. Sarah never told us. Emma didn't know who I was until today — she thought I was him. She thought Daniel had just... never bothered. For seven years she's thought that, looking after the boy since January and thinking it."
"And Leo thought you were alive and just hadn't come."
"Leo thought his dad had forgotten him," Nathan said. "He stood there and apologised for nothing in the middle of our fair, and — " He stopped. His hand had tightened on the bottle. He set it down with care. "Do you know what the worst part is, D? If I'd driven past that beach that summer — I didn't, I was in Alaska, I was in Alaska the whole summer, there's a deployment record a mile long — but if I had, I'd never have known them either. Daniel never told me about her. His own twin. He was going to be a father and he never told me."
"Maybe he tried."
"He didn't."
"You don't know that."
"I know I buried him," Nathan said, "without knowing he had a girl he loved, and a son coming. I stood in a cemetery and called him carefree, in the eulogy. Carefree. Everyone laughed. And all the time he had been driving home through the night to tell me something. I don't know anything. That's the truth of it. I don't know anything about the last year of my own brother's life."
Derek was quiet a moment, in the way of a man turning a thing over to look at its underside. "He fixed my dad's outboard once," he said. "At the coast. Wouldn't take money. Said a motor was just an argument you could win, and he liked winning arguments. Dad said he was the only Reed who ever left a room richer in friends than he went in." He turned his own bottle in a circle, mirroring Nathan without knowing it. "Carefree is what people say about a man whose bills they've never seen, Nate. I stood at that funeral too, and what I remember is your mother not crying, and you doing the eulogy like a situation report, and I thought: this family is going to carry this the way they carry everything, in silence and in good shoes. And all the time there was a kid on the way who'd have called him Dad. Daniel wasn't carefree. He was just the only one of you who spent his feelings where people could see them."
Across the city, in a second-floor flat above a laundrette, Leo Collins was supposed to be asleep.
Emma had made the sofa bed up with the good blanket, the one with the rockets. She had answered, in order, the questions he always asked at bedtime since January — is the door locked, is Dog here, will you check the window — and then she had gone into the kitchen to wash two mugs, because her hands needed a task, and she heard the springs creak behind her.
"Aunt Emma."
"You're meant to be asleep, mister."
"Is the man at the fire place in trouble?" Leo stood in the doorway in his pyjamas, the stuffed dog Sarah had won him at a fair — a different fair — tucked under one arm. "For not being Dad."
"Nobody is in trouble."
"He was sad. His hands were shaking. Grown-ups' hands don't shake."
"No," Emma said, honestly, before she could decide whether honesty was wise. "They do sometimes."
Leo considered this with the gravity of a judge. "If Dad is in the ground," he said, "then whose grave is it? The one we went to with Mum, with the flowers. Mum said Dad was a remembering place."
"That's right."
"But if he's a remembering place, why did the picture — " He frowned, working at it, a seven-year-old trying to build a bridge across a gorge with the planks he had. "Mum showed me a picture of a stone once. She cried in the kitchen. I thought she was sad about Grandma."
Emma put the mug down very carefully in the sink. Sarah, at a kitchen sink like this one, crying over a photograph of a headstone she had never taken her son to see. Sisters, she thought, keep the strangest mercies. She had always believed she knew the shape of Sarah's grief. She had never once imagined it whole and continuing, a boy growing taller every year beside a grave his mother visited in pictures.
"Come here," she said, and Leo climbed onto the kitchen chair and then, without ceremony, sideways into her lap though he was almost too big for it now, and she held the whole warm, bony weight of him.
Leo asked, around a yawn he was trying to hide, whether the man at the fire station had ever met his mum, and Emma said no, love, he never did, and Leo considered this with the seriousness he brought to all injustices and announced that that was sad for him, then. He said it the way he said everything important, as a finding of fact: the man had Dad's face and none of Dad's knowing-her, which was the worst of both, and somebody should tell him about her laugh. Emma said somebody would. She did not say that she had spent four months rehearsing a speech for a different man entirely, a speech with four months of fury folded into it like a blade, and that she had delivered it that morning to entirely the wrong pair of shoulders, and that the shoulders had stood there and taken it and offered the boy the truth with his bare wrist held out. She tucked the blanket with the rockets around a child who was already half asleep, and thought that perhaps the speech was not wasted. Perhaps it had finally reached the family it was addressed to.
"Tomorrow," she said into his hair, "we are going to talk properly about your dad. All of it. The bits I know and the bits I got wrong. And Captain Reed — the man at the fire station, his name is Nathan — he is your dad's brother. Your uncle. That's a real thing, Leo. That's not nothing."
"He has Dad's face."
"He does."
"It's not fair that he has it if he's not Dad."
"No," Emma said. "It isn't. Come on. Bed. And Leo — " She held him a moment longer. "You were very brave today. And you are not to run off from me ever again, do you hear me?"
"Even if I see him again?"
"Especially then. We see him together, or not at all. Promise me."
At Derek's table, Nathan's phone lit up on the wood between them. A number he didn't know. He stared at it the way a man stares at a door he has been avoiding for years, and then he picked it up, because a boy in too-big pyjamas had been braver that day than he had managed to be in seven years of Octobers.
"Captain Reed? It's Emma Collins." Her voice was low and exhausted. "Leo's asleep. I wanted to say — he has things of Sarah's. A box. I have never properly gone through it, I couldn't. If you want the truth about your brother, I think some of it is in that box. Come tomorrow. Please. And Captain — bring a photograph of Daniel. A real one. He needs to see there were two of you."
Nathan looked across the table at Derek, who mouthed, Say yes, with the whole of his face.