"Richard — "
"People have birthmarks," he said again, and this time there was something underneath the words, a note of warning she had not heard from him in twenty-three years. He looked past her shoulder toward the kitchen doors, where the girl had disappeared. When he looked back, his face was composed, almost gentle. "Eat your dinner, Eleanor."
She picked up the clean fork the busboy had brought. The sole arrived. The wine arrived, dark red. She lifted a bite to her mouth and tasted nothing at all.
Across the table, Richard ate with his usual precision, cutting his duck into even pieces, and did not look at her again. Between them, in the warm oval of the sconce light, the silence stretched and tightened, and Eleanor understood — with the slow, cold clarity of a woman who has finally stopped pretending — that he had seen it too.
And that he was afraid.
Chapter 2: The Silver Locket
Eleanor had worn the locket every day for twenty-three years. She had worn it to board meetings and funerals and the christenings of other people's grandchildren. She had worn it through airport security, where once a young agent had asked what was inside, and she had said, "My daughter," in a tone that ended all further questions. It had gone gray at the edges and smooth as river glass where her thumb found it, a hundred times a day, without her deciding to find it.
She did not take it off when she and Richard got home. She took it off now, in the restaurant, with the sole going cold on her plate and Richard watching her with that terrible, gentle steadiness.
"Eleanor, don't."
"I'm not going to make a scene." Her fingers worked the clasp — it caught, the way it always caught, and for a terrible second she thought she might cry in front of the entire dining room, which would indeed be a scene. Then the chain came free and she held the locket in her palm. "I just want to show her something."
"She's working. Leave the girl alone."
"Richard." Eleanor looked up at him. "If I'm wrong, it's a locket. It's nothing."
He said nothing. The muscle at the corner of his jaw moved once.
When the waitress came back to clear the plates, Eleanor was ready. She had rehearsed the words while the girl poured water at the next table, and they came out steadier than she expected.
"What's your name, dear?"
"Emily." The girl stacked the plates with efficient hands. "Emily Carter."
"Emily." Eleanor opened her palm. The locket sat there, oval and silver, catching the sconce light. "I want to show you something. And then I want to ask you something, and if it's — if it's too much, you can walk away, and I will pay our check and never come back here. All right?"
Emily glanced at Richard, who was staring at the locket as if it were a loaded weapon. "All right?"
"Open it," Eleanor said.
The girl set the plates down. She took the locket — her fingers were quick and careful, a waitress's fingers — and thumbed the catch. It opened with a soft click, and there, behind glass gone cloudy at the corners, was the photograph.
It was faded to the color of weak tea. A newborn, wrapped in a hospital blanket, one tiny arm thrown up beside her cheek as if in sleep. And on the inside of that tiny wrist, unmistakable even through twenty-three years of fading: a heart-shaped mark. Reddish-brown, coin-sized, the point tapering toward the palm.
Emily went very still. Eleanor watched the girl's face the way she had watched her own face in mirrors after Grace died — for the moment the meaning arrived.
"That's my daughter," Eleanor said. "She was born at Saint Anne's Hospital. She lived for five days."
Emily looked up from the photograph. Her eyes moved from Eleanor's face to the locket to her own wrist, where the sleeve had ridden up again as she held the silver oval, and Eleanor saw it happen — the girl saw it too, the matching, the impossibility, and her mouth opened and nothing came out.
"I was left at Saint Mary's Orphanage," Emily said at last. Her voice was thin. "When I was a baby. That's what I was told. Somebody left me at the door."
The words landed in the space between them like stones dropped into deep water. Eleanor felt Richard go rigid beside her — she felt it through the table, through the floor, through the air itself.
"Emily — " Eleanor began.
Richard stood up.
The chair scraped back hard against the floor, loud enough that heads turned at three nearby tables. He was upright, one hand flat on the tablecloth, his napkin fallen to the floor, and his face had gone the color of ash.
"Eleanor," he said. "Stop this."