"Spring," Elias said. "Nine months after—"
"After the summer you left. Yes. I can count, Elias. I've been able to count for sixteen years, which is more than I can say for anyone else in this business." She shelled in silence for a moment. "Half this town can count, if it comes to that. The other half prefers not to. There's a difference, and don't you forget it."
"Why didn't you ever—" He stopped. It came out harder than he meant. "Sixteen years, Maude. You had my address. You had my number. One phone call."
"And say what?" She looked up, and her eyes were not unkind, which made it worse. "Say, 'Elias, that girl at the dock's yours, the dates say so'? You'd have come back here like a fire, and you'd have met Harlan Prescott standing in the road with sixteen years of law and money and a story he'd already told the whole town, and a girl in the middle of it who'd been told her father walked away from her before she was born. You think a phone call from me was going to beat that? You think Adeline would have opened the door to you because your aunt did arithmetic?"
"You could have told me she existed."
"Boy." Maude set the colander down. "I have wondered, every Christmas and every one of that child's birthdays, whether I was being wise or just being a coward with a good excuse. Don't sit in my kitchen and pretend I haven't paid for it. I chose the girl's peace over your rights, and I chose Adeline's version of events over a fight, and I have not enjoyed a single year of it. But I'll tell you what I told myself: the truth keeps. Rot spreads, but the truth keeps. And now you're here with a contract and a boathouse and that child teaching you how to hold a rib, and maybe — maybe — the truth's finally got somewhere to land."
Elias sat with that. The peas ticked into the colander.
"She hums the shanty," he said at last. "Grandmother's. The gull song. Adeline taught it to her without the words. Maude — Adeline hums it doing the dishes."
His aunt's hands stopped.
"Well," Maude said softly. "Well, well." She looked toward the window, where the harbor was going down into dusk. "Then maybe there's more keeping than I knew." She picked up her peas again, briskly, the way she did when something had got past her guard. "Eat something. You're no use to that girl hollow. And Elias — when you go to her mother with this, and you will, go gentle. Whatever was done to you was done to her too, in the other direction. Sixteen years of arithmetic cuts everybody in that house."
"Tell me the rest of it," he said. "The parts I wasn't here for. After I left."
Maude's mouth thinned, but she told it, in her flat way, like reading out a tide table. Adeline had been taken out of her last year of school that autumn — "a cousin in Bangor," the town was told, a cousin nobody had ever met before or since. She'd come home the following summer with a baby and a wedding ring, married to Stephen Kellerman in a ceremony at the Prescott house so small and so fast that the library ladies were still offended about it a decade later. The marriage hadn't lasted two years. Adeline had moved into the rooms over the library with the child, and then into the little house on Gull Street, and she had raised Wren on a librarian's salary and an iron refusal of her father's money, and Stephen had gone off to make his fortune in developments and come back with it, the way a tide comes back whether you want it or not.
"And the father?" Elias said. "What did the town get told about the father?"
"That there wasn't one worth naming." Maude said it without looking at him. "Harlan's version, served early and often: a summer boy, a nobody, gone. After a while people stopped asking, the way people do. It isn't that they believed it, Elias. It's that Adeline never once corrected it, and a woman not correcting a thing reads the same as a woman confirming it."
He stayed for supper. He shelled peas badly and was corrected. And all evening, under everything, the date sat in him like a stone in a pocket — spring, nine months, his — no longer a suspicion to be managed but a fact to be carried, carefully, toward the one conversation in the world he was most afraid of having.
Chapter 8: Asking Adeline
He rehearsed it for three days, and every rehearsal was better than the event.
He rehearsed it sanding a hull, and it came out clean and calm and reasonable. He rehearsed it driving to the lumber yard, and it acquired evidence, presented in order, with dates. He rehearsed it at three in the morning in Maude's spare room and it acquired the truth, which was that he was frightened — frightened of the answer in both directions, frightened of the door, which he could already picture closing, because Adeline had been practicing closing it for sixteen years and he had seen her technique.
In the end he didn't choose the moment at all. The moment chose him, on a wet Tuesday, in the library, an hour before closing, with the rain coming down the windows and the cafe chairs upended on the tables and Wren not there — Wren, for once, was at a friend's, which Elias understood later was the only mercy the day intended him.
Adeline was shelving returns. She had a pencil behind her ear and reading glasses she took off when she saw him, instantly, the way she'd taken off every soft thing in his presence since he'd come back to town.
"The boathouse is that way," she said.
"I know where the boathouse is, Addie."
"Then this is a social call." She put a book on the shelf with great precision. "We don't do those. We established that."
"We established it sixteen years ago. I've been thinking we might have established it wrong."
Her hand stopped on the book. She did not turn around. "Don't," she said.
"I have to ask you something. I've tried to find a version of my life where I don't ask it and there isn't one." He took a breath that he heard himself take, which embarrassed him. "Adeline. Is Wren mine?"
The word mine landed in the quiet library like a dropped glass.
She turned around then. Slowly. What was on her face was not surprise — that was the thing he hadn't rehearsed for. He had expected surprise, or fury, or the cold aristocratic blankness she'd been using on him all summer. What he got was older than all of those. What he got was grief, unguarded for exactly one second, before the guard came down like a shutter.