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Chapter 1: The Boy at the Fountain
October arrived in Boston that year with the kind of clarity Michael Rourke had come to associate with early morning depositions: sharp, unforgiving, and gone by noon. The leaves in Boston Common had turned mostly at once, as if the trees had made a collective decision overnight, and now they lay banked against the iron fence like drifts of copper change. It was Wednesday, and Wednesdays belonged to Lily.
She had claimed the custody afternoon the way she claimed everything at seven years old — absolutely, and on the theory that the arrangement had been designed around her schedule all along. "The swans are better on Wednesdays," she informed Michael as they entered the Common, which was not an observation that could be tested. She was holding his hand with two hands, her fingers cold through the wool of his glove. He wore the navy suit he had worn to court that morning, loosened at the collar, and he had left his briefcase in the car, which felt like the most reckless thing he had done all month.
They walked the path in the slanting light. The Frog Pond fountain was throwing its high, white plume into air that fractured it into a fine mist. Lily let go of Michael's hand to run ahead — not far, never far, some unspoken custody rule — and stood with her nose practically in the spray, checking back over her shoulder to make sure he was watching.
He was watching. That was the whole point of Wednesdays: to be the father who was watching.
It was then that Lily tugged his hand and pointed past the fountain to the benches on the far side of the path.
"Dad," she said. "That boy looks like me."
Michael followed her pointing. A boy sat alone on a bench near the edge of the trees, small, his hands folded in his lap around something. He was eight, maybe. What struck Michael first was the jacket — a thin windbreaker, the kind of thing you wore on a windy evening in September, and it was October now, properly October, with the damp kind of cold that got under everything. Below it, jeans with a tear at one knee, and sneakers that had been repaired around the toes with silver tape. On the bench beside him sat a brown paper bag, creased and soft with handling, the way a grocery bag gets when it's been carried too many times.
"No adult," Michael said quietly, scanning. He did it automatically, the way he'd learned to do in the two years since the divorce: take inventory of children in his peripheral vision, count the adults. Around the fountain, mothers and nannies and one grandfather with twins. No one watching the boy on the bench.
"Maybe he's waiting," Lily said.
"Maybe." Michael didn't move. The boy wasn't playing or watching the fountain. He was looking at the bag. He would touch it, adjust it, look at it, in a loop — the way Michael himself straightened his desk when he was stalling on a difficult phone call. Lily had gone quiet beside him, which almost never happened, and that decided him.
"Come on," he said, and Lily slipped her hand back into his.
They crossed the path at a diagonal. Up close, the boy looked smaller than he had from a distance. Up close, too, Michael could see that his face was scrubbed clean and his hair had been combed wet that morning — somebody had made an effort — which somehow made the thin jacket worse. The boy looked up as they approached, and for a half second Michael had the sensation that Lily was right: there was something familiar in the line of the boy's eyebrows, the set of his mouth. He told himself it was the same thing every adult tells himself about every unfamiliar child, which was nothing.
The boy shifted on the bench, making room, as though they had been invited.
"Hi there," Michael said. He crouched — no, crouched wasn't quite it. He lowered himself the way he did when Lily was upset, until his eyes were on the boy's level, his knees complaining faintly against the pavement. From this angle he could see into the paper bag: the corner of something creased, something colorful, something that looked like a sticker peeled carefully off a shirt. The boy's arms came around the bag, not quickly, not defensively — protectively.
"Are you lost?" Michael asked gently.
The boy looked at him for a long moment. Lily, at Michael's shoulder, leaned forward slightly, the way she did when she was reading somebody's expression like it was a book she hadn't been assigned yet.
"I was waiting," the boy said at last, in a small, level voice. "My mom said she'd come back."
"When did she say that?" Michael asked.
The boy thought about it. "Before."
Behind Michael, Lily shifted her weight, and he felt her hand find the back of his coat, a signal she used when she wanted to stay close. Michael kept his eyes on the boy. The cold was getting into his knees through the good wool of his trousers. Somewhere behind them the fountain kept throwing its plume into the air, and the mist drifted across the path and touched Michael's neck.
"Okay," Michael said. "Okay. What's your name?"
The boy's arms tightened around the bag, just slightly.
"Ethan," he said.
"Hi, Ethan." Michael smiled, the careful one he used for witnesses. "I'm Michael. This is Lily."
"Hi, Ethan," Lily said. She said it the way she'd say it to a new kid at school — immediately, without suspicion. Then, to Michael, under her breath: "His jacket's too small."
Michael looked at Ethan again, properly looked at him: the careful combed hair, the taped shoes, the paper bag held like a small animal. The boy was watching Michael's face the way Lily watched him when she was deciding whether to tell him something.
"Would you like to sit with us for a little while, Ethan?" Michael said. "Until we figure things out."
Ethan glanced at the fountain, at Lily, at the path in both directions — measuring, it seemed, the size of the offer. Then he nodded once and slid over on the bench, and Michael lowered himself to sit beside him, kneeling only briefly, briefly enough that Ethan noticed and seemed, somehow, to count it.
* * *
Chapter 2: Are You My Dad?
They sat three across on the bench, which Lily rearranged by sitting on the bench itself with her feet tucked under her, leaning slightly toward Ethan as though he were a television she had been allowed to turn up. The brown paper bag rested between Ethan and Michael. Ethan's hands stayed on it.
Michael asked the questions he knew from two years of being the kind of father who arrived early to pickup: What school do you go to, what grade are you in, do you live nearby. Ethan answered in the short, complete sentences of a child who had been taught to be polite to adults. Third grade. He did not say the name of the school. He did not say where he lived. When Michael asked who was supposed to meet him, Ethan said, "My mom," and added, after a pause, "She said she'd come back," in a tone that suggested he had said this to himself many times and it had not improved with repetition.
Lily was quiet for a full ninety seconds, a personal record. Then she leaned across the bag and said, "Your jacket's not warm enough."