Ethan looked down at the jacket. "It's okay."
"It's not okay," Lily said. "Your hands are shaking."
"They're not," Ethan said, and put his hands more firmly on the bag, which Michael suspected was exactly what he had been doing before, only now with an audience.
Michael was deciding what to do next — whether to call the number on the back of a school ID that Ethan didn't seem to have, whether to ask at the visitors' office across the Common, whether any of this was his business beyond the next twenty minutes — when Ethan reached into the bag.
He did it carefully, like someone opening a box they had packed themselves. He pulled out a photograph. It was creased from being folded and unfolded; the fold ran across the middle like a horizon line, and the edges had gone the soft sepia brown of old paper, though the photograph itself could not have been more than a decade old. Ethan held it out to Michael with both hands.
Michael took it.
A waterfront. The stone edge of some pier, the water behind it catching late-afternoon light, a sailboat blurred in the distance. And in the foreground, a woman, laughing — head tipped back, dark hair lifted by the wind off her shoulders — and beside her, with his arm around her waist, a young man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, grinning the unguarded grin of a person who has not yet learned to be careful.
The young man was Michael.
He knew it before the thought finished forming. He knew the shirt. He knew the scar on the knuckle of his own left hand, visible even at this scale. He knew the water — Newport, the harbor at the end of Thames Street, the stone bench where they used to sit. The woman's name came up out of nine years like a coin out of a fountain.
Claire.
Beside him, Lily said, "Dad?" and he heard in her voice that she had seen something happen to his face.
Nine years. That summer had been nine years ago — four months in Newport, the partnership offer, the apartment in Boston, all of it. He did the arithmetic the way his brain insisted on doing arithmetic when something was too large to hold any other way: nine years, and the boy sitting next to him was eight. The numbers aligned with the clean, terrible click of a lock turning.
He was aware that Ethan was watching him. Not the photograph — him. The boy's expression was calm, almost formal, as though he had done this part before in his head a thousand times and had decided on exactly this posture.
"She's pretty," Lily said, leaning in to look at the photograph. "Is that your girlfriend, Dad?"
Michael's mouth was dry. "She was — a long time ago."
Ethan's voice was very small. "Is that you?"
Michael looked at the boy. Really looked at him now, past the combed hair and the taped shoes, and there it was — the line of the eyebrows, the set of the mouth, the particular green of the eyes that Lily had gotten from him and that Ethan had gotten from him too. Lily had been right from across the fountain. He had told himself it was nothing. It had never been nothing.
"Yes," Michael said. "That's me."
Ethan nodded, once, as though this were confirmation of something already settled. Then he looked up at Michael, and his voice, when it came, was so quiet that Michael had to lean in to hear it over the fountain.
"Are you my dad?"
Lily's head turned sharply. Michael felt her go still beside him, and he understood, with the sickening clarity of a man watching a deposition transcript go wrong, that she was watching his face to decide how frightened to be.
Michael looked at the photograph, at the younger version of himself with his arm around Claire Bennett, laughing into a Newport afternoon, and then at the boy — the real boy, cold on a bench in Boston Common, holding a paper bag like it was the only thing in the world that was his.
"I think," Michael said carefully, "we need to talk about this. All of it." He folded the photograph and handed it back to Ethan, who took it and slid it into the bag with the practiced motion of a child who had done it a hundred times. "But first," Michael said, "let's get you somewhere warm."
Ethan looked at him for a long moment, and then — so small Michael almost missed it — he nodded.
* * *
Chapter 3: Four Blocks Away
"Somewhere warm" was, Michael realized, a more complicated question than it sounded. The coffee shop across the street had tables and hot chocolate, and Michael's brain — the part of it that billed hours and wrote briefs — was already moving toward it, already inventorying the steps: warm drinks, a phone call, some patient adult conversation. But Ethan was still sitting on the bench with the bag in his lap, and Lily had climbed down and was standing in front of him, studying his taped shoes with the frank curiosity of a seven-year-old anthropologist.
"Why is your mom not here?" Lily asked.
Michael shot her a look. Lily ignored it with the ease of long practice.
"She's sick," Ethan said. He said it simply, the way a child says a thing he has had to say to many adults. "She's in the hospital."
Michael felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the October air. "Which hospital, Ethan?"
Ethan glanced toward the trees, toward the street beyond them, as if the building were visible through the leaves. "St. Catherine's." He said the name with the familiarity of a regular visitor. "She said she'd come back this morning, but then she didn't, so I came to the fountain."
"You walked here by yourself?" Michael asked.
Ethan nodded. From the bag, slightly visible now, Michael could see the corner of a card — crayon letters in large, careful script — and something that looked like a visitor's sticker, peeled from a shirt and smoothed flat. A child's collection of evidence.
"When did your mom go to the hospital?" Michael asked.
"Before," Ethan said again. It seemed to be his word for the time when things had changed. "A lady stays with me after school, but she's sick too now. Mom said —" He stopped, and for the first time his voice wobbled, just slightly. "Mom said if I ever saw him, I should ask."