Leo looked at the offered hand. He looked at the photograph. Then he put his small hand in Daniel's, and they walked together across the gravel toward the office, and Daniel did not let go.
Chapter 2
The Man in the Photograph
The office of Mercer & Sons was a room that had been waiting thirty years to be cleaned. Daniel sat the boy at the desk his father never used and poured cocoa from the kettle Tom Beckett had left behind years ago. Leo wrapped both hands around the mug and watched Daniel with those careful eyes while Daniel studied the photograph in the lamplight.
Up close, it got worse — or better, Daniel couldn't decide. The young man in the picture was Jonah at twenty, no question: the scar through the left eyebrow from when he was fourteen, the crooked front tooth he'd never let anyone fix, the grin like smiling was a sport. Daniel could date it by the hair alone — Jonah had worn it long that year, tied back with whatever was handy. That put this in 2018. The last summer.
The girl had her head thrown back, laughing. Dark hair, long, a scattering of freckles across her nose. Daniel knew every person Jonah had run with that year — the boatyard kids, the surfers from the point — and he had never seen this girl. He turned the photo over.
"J + M, our secret — May 2018." Faded blue ink, in a woman's handwriting. The letters had gone soft at the edges from years of handling.
Eight years. This photograph had been carried around for eight years by people Daniel had never heard of, in a town where he'd lived his whole life.
"Tell me about your grandma," Daniel said. "The drawer."
"Abuela Elena," Leo said. "She fell on the stairs yesterday. She's at the hospital." He said it with the flatness of a child reporting weather. "I went to her house to get her rosary and my mom told me don't open the drawer but the rosary was in the drawer so I had to open it."
"And the photo was in there."
"Under a yellow blanket. A baby one." Leo's gaze flicked to Daniel's face. "Is it yours? The photo?"
"No." Daniel set it down gently. "Leo — Jonah died in July 2018. Two months after this was taken. He drowned out past the breakwater in a squall." He said it the way he'd said it a hundred times, to insurance men and to Anna and to himself in the dark. "I never knew he had — I never knew about your mom. I never knew about you."
Leo absorbed this. He was seven, but the arithmetic behind his eyes was doing something that hurt to watch. "May is before July," he said.
"Yes."
"So he knew." It wasn't a question. "He knew about me before — " Leo stopped. "My mom says he left. She says he went away and didn't come back."
Daniel's hands went very still around his own mug. "He didn't leave, Leo. He died. I promise you, if Jonah had known — " He stopped too, because he didn't know what Jonah would have done, and promising a dead man's intentions to his son felt like a debt he had no right to sign.
"What was he like?" Leo asked.
The question cracked something in Daniel's chest that he thought had healed. "Golden," he said. "That's the word everyone used. He was — he could make a whole room feel like it was his birthday. He was reckless. Kind to a fault. He couldn't stand to see anybody left out of anything." "He was the kind of person who made you feel like the luckiest person alive just for being near him, and then he'd do something so stupid it scared you half to death."
Leo nodded slowly, filing this away, and Daniel had to look away, because the boy was nodding the way Jonah used to nod when he was storing something up.
"Your mom," Daniel said. "What's her name?"
"Marisol. Marisol Vega." Leo pronounced it with a small, unconscious pride. "She works at the diner. The Harbor Light."
Daniel repeated the name silently. Nothing surfaced — no memory of her at the boatyard, at school, anywhere. She'd have been about Jonah's age. And Daniel had been in Seattle by then, eleven years gone, married, living a different life entirely.
"I was in Seattle in 2018," Daniel said, half to Leo and half to himself. "I didn't come home much. I didn't know." He looked at the boy. "Leo, does your mom know you took the photo?"
Leo looked down at his cocoa. "No."
"Is she going to be angry?"
The boy considered this with terrible seriousness. "She gets scared when I ask about him. Not mad. Scared. Like when the big waves come." He looked up. "Are you going to tell her?"
Daniel thought about it. He thought about the weight of the photograph in his palm and the blue ink on the back and the yellow baby blanket under a rosary in a drawer. He thought about Marisol Vega getting scared like the big waves were coming, and he felt a protectiveness rise up in him so sudden it startled him — not for the memory of his brother, but for the boy sitting across from him with cocoa going cold in his hands.
"No," Daniel said. "That's your business, buddy. You tell her when you're ready." He slid the photograph back across the desk. "But Leo — I want to meet your mom. Not to scare her. I just — " He stopped. What did he want? The truth, he supposed. Eight years of truth, arriving all at once on a gray Saturday morning in the hands of a seven-year-old. "I want to understand. And I think she deserves to know that Jonah didn't leave her. He would never have left."
Leo picked up the photograph and held it against his chest. "He's in the water," he said quietly. "That's what Abuela says. He's with the water now."
Daniel didn't correct him. He came around the desk and crouched beside the chair, and the boy leaned — just slightly, just enough — into his shoulder, the way tired children lean on whatever solid thing is nearest. Daniel put his hand, big and scarred and smelling of varnish, on the back of Leo's too-big jacket.