Lily, who had been listening with unusual gravity, said, "Him who?"
Ethan looked at Michael. He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Michael stood. His knees were stiff from the cold bench, and he was aware of a peculiar feeling in his chest — not panic, exactly, but the way he had felt once, years ago, when he realized mid-argument that the case he was about to win was the wrong case. He looked down the path toward the street. St. Catherine's was four blocks from the Common. He had driven past it a hundred times and never once gone inside.
"Okay," he said. He held out his hand to Ethan. "Let's go see her."
Ethan stared at the hand. He looked at it for what felt like a long time, and Michael understood that this was a decision the boy was making — not about Michael, but about the bag, about the plan, about everything. Then, slowly, Ethan put the bag's handles over his own wrist — he was not letting go of it — and took Michael's hand.
It was very cold, and very small.
Lily, without being asked, took Michael's other hand. She did it the way she did everything, with total confidence that this was where her hand belonged. The three of them stood there for a moment — Michael in his navy suit between a girl in a good warm coat and a boy in a jacket that was too thin — and then they started walking.
The walk was four blocks, and Michael would remember it later in pieces: the leaves skittering across the sidewalk; Lily narrating the shop windows for Ethan, who said almost nothing; Ethan's grip tightening every time they crossed a street; the way Michael found himself matching his pace to the shortest legs without thinking about it. At the corner of the third block, Ethan stopped.
"She might be sleeping," Ethan said quietly.
"That's okay," Michael said. "We can be quiet."
Lily leaned around Michael to look at Ethan. "Is your mom pretty like in the picture?"
Ethan considered this seriously. "She's tired," he said. "But when she laughs, she looks like it."
Michael's throat closed. He kept walking.
St. Catherine's rose up on the corner — brick, ivy, a porte-cochère with an ambulance parked under it, the glass doors sliding open and closed on a lobby that smelled, even from the sidewalk, of antiseptic and coffee. Ethan stopped again at the entrance, and Michael felt the small hand tighten in his.
"Do you come here a lot?" Michael asked.
Ethan nodded. From his wrist, the paper bag swung gently. "Fourth floor," he said. "Cardiac."
Michael looked at the building, at the lit windows going up, at the fourth floor he could not see. Nine years. A child of eight. A photograph with a fold across the middle. He had walked into courtrooms less prepared than this, and he had always, always been the one doing the asking.
Lily tugged his hand. "Dad," she said softly. "It's okay. Let's go."
And Michael — who had spent two years being careful, who had organized his life into custody afternoons and billable hours and the manageable, scheduled love of Wednesdays — walked through the sliding doors with a seven-year-old on one hand and an eight-year-old on the other, into the warm, antiseptic air, toward the elevators and the fourth floor and whatever waited there.
Ethan led them to the elevators as if he had the route memorized, which he did. He pressed the button himself — standing on tiptoe, the bag still looped over his wrist — and when the doors opened he stepped in first and reached for the four. Lily watched him with open admiration. "You know where everything is," she said. Ethan shrugged, but Michael saw the small lift at the corner of his mouth, the first almost-smile of the afternoon. The elevator rose with its soft mechanical hum, and Michael found himself counting the lit numbers the way he counted down the last minute before a verdict, holding a seven-year-old's hand on one side and an eight-year-old's on the other.
* * *
Chapter 4: St. Catherine's
The cardiac ward on the fourth floor of St. Catherine's was quiet in the particular way of hospital floors in the afternoon — not silent, but hushed, as though everyone had agreed to keep their voices low out of respect for the machinery. Monitors beeped softly from behind half-closed doors. A cart rattled somewhere far off. The air smelled of disinfectant and something underneath it, something sweet, like the juice boxes in a pediatric waiting room.
Claire Bennett was awake.
She had been awake for most of the afternoon, which was worse than sleeping, because awake meant thinking. She was thinking about Ethan — where he was, whether Mrs. Alvarez's niece had remembered to pick him up, whether he had eaten the sandwich she had left wrapped in the refrigerator with a note in crayon on top, because Ethan liked notes. She was thinking about the cardiologist's face that morning when he said the word "stenosis" the way people say the word "storm" — like it was coming whether she wanted it to or not. She was thinking about money, which was the one thought she could not afford and could not stop.
The valve surgery. She needed it. She knew the number. She had known the number for three weeks, and the number had not changed, and the number was the size of a house, and she cleaned houses for a living — hotel rooms, actually, which was worse, because hotel rooms never got any bigger no matter how long you worked.
She was doing the math again, the hopeless math, when the door opened.
She looked up, and the math stopped.
A man stood in the doorway. A navy suit, loosened collar, hair a little grayer at the temples than she remembered. He was holding a child's hand. And then she saw whose hand it was — the small wrist with the paper bag looped over it, the thin jacket — and the room tilted, and then righted itself, and she understood that she was not dreaming because in dreams Ethan never looked that cold.
Michael Rourke stood in the doorway of her hospital room, holding her son's hand.
Nine years. She had not seen him in nine years, not since the last morning in Newport when he had kissed her at the bus station and said he would call, and he had, and she had believed the secretary, and she had never called back. She had carried that morning for nine years the way you carry a stone in your shoe — not always noticing it, never able to remove it.
"Claire," he said.
Her name in his voice, after nine years, did something to her chest that had nothing to do with her heart valve.
Ethan crossed the room before either of them could move. He climbed onto the bed with the practiced ease of a child who had done it a hundred times in this room — careful of the wires, careful of the tube, fitting himself against her side like a puzzle piece — and put the paper bag in her lap.
"Hi, Mom," he said. "I found him."
Claire looked at the bag. She knew what was in it. She had packed it with him, weeks ago, when the doctors had first started saying words like "critical" — the photograph, the birthday card he had written at six and never given anyone, the drawing of the house with the four stick figures, the visitor sticker he had insisted on keeping. "In case," she had said, and he had nodded, and they had never said in case of what.