It was not loud. That was the worst of it — it was not loud at all. It was the voice he used in boardrooms when something had gone irretrievably wrong and everyone in the room needed to understand it at once.
Eleanor looked up at him. She had been married to this man for thirty-one years. She had held his hand in a hospital corridor while he told her their daughter was gone. She had never once, in all that time, heard him sound afraid of her.
She closed her hand around the locket. It was warm from Emily's fingers.
"Richard," she said quietly, "sit down."
He didn't sit. He stood over the table in his tailored suit, in the low kind light of the restaurant, breathing like a man who had just surfaced from deep water. Emily had taken a step back. She was holding the plates against her chest like a shield, and her eyes were enormous.
"My check," Richard said to no one in particular, to the room, to the young manager who had materialized at the edge of the light. "We'll take our check."
* * *
Emily made it to the service corridor before her hands started shaking.
She set the plates down on the pass and stood there with her back to the kitchen noise, staring at her own left wrist. She pushed the sleeve up. The birthmark sat there, reddish-brown at the edges, darker in the middle, the same as it had been every day of her twenty-three years. She had never thought about it. It was just the thing she covered with bracelets when she wanted to look polished.
A heart. On the inside of her left wrist.
She thought of the photograph in the locket — the tiny arm, the tiny wrist, the same mark, and the woman's face when she had said she was born at Saint Anne's Hospital. Emily's hands were shaking so hard she had to press her wrist against the cool steel of the pass to steady them.
"Sofia," she said, when her friend came through the doors with a tray. "I need you to cover my tables."
"What happened? You look like — "
"I don't know," Emily said. "I really don't know."
Chapter 3: Five Days Old
March 2003. The crocuses were coming up along Commonwealth Avenue, and Eleanor was thirty-five years old, and the baby was perfect.
That was the word everyone used, and Eleanor used it too, because no other word would do. Grace Elizabeth Whitmore, born at Saint Anne's Hospital at 6:14 on a Tuesday morning, seven pounds four ounces, with a full head of dark hair and a lusty cry. Richard had held her first, after Eleanor, and he had wept — actually wept, the only time she had ever seen it — and said, "She looks like your mother," which was not true but was kind.
They brought her home to Beacon Hill on the third day, and the townhouse filled with flowers. Eleanor's mother came down from Marblehead and wept over the bassinet. Richard's partners sent silver rattles. The housekeeper made soup that nobody ate because nobody could stop looking at the baby.
Eleanor learned her in those days the way you learn a new city — by walking it. The weight of her in the crook of an arm. The particular sigh she gave before falling asleep. The birthmark on the inside of her left wrist, heart-shaped, reddish-brown at the edges and darker at the center, no bigger than a coin. Eleanor touched it with her fingertip a hundred times. It became a kind of prayer: this one, this one I would know anywhere, this one is mine.
On the fifth day, the pediatrician wanted one more look at a murmur that was probably nothing. "Probably nothing" was the phrase he used, smiling, and Eleanor believed him, because she had decided that nothing bad could reach them now — they had waited so long, they had wanted her so much, and wanting, she believed, was a kind of protection.
They drove to Saint Anne's at four in the afternoon. The sky was the pale, rinsed blue of early spring. Grace slept in her car seat the whole way, the birthmark visible where her blanket had slipped, and Eleanor kept reaching back to tuck it around her, and Richard said, "She's fine, Ellie, she's sleeping," and Eleanor said, "I know," and tucked it anyway.
The appointment took eleven minutes. The murmur was nothing. They were laughing about it in the corridor — Richard had his hand on the small of her back, Grace was waking up, rooting against Eleanor's shoulder — when the nurse said the doctor wanted to keep her overnight for observation. Just observation. Just to be thorough.
Eleanor argued. She was good at arguing; she had argued her way onto three boards before she was thirty. But Richard put his arm around her and said, "It's one night. She's in the best place she could be," and the nurse was already wheeling the bassinet toward the nursery, and Grace — five days old, five days — opened her eyes as the bassinet rolled away, and looked directly at Eleanor, and Eleanor would remember that look for the rest of her life, because it was the last time she ever saw her daughter alive.
They went home for dinner. The housekeeper had made a roast. Eleanor couldn't eat. She called the nursery at nine, and the nurse said the baby was sleeping beautifully, and Eleanor stood at the window of the nursery they had painted the color of morning and listened to the empty room hum.
The phone rang at 1:47 in the morning.
Later she would learn the sequence from the papers Richard signed: a fire in the records room on the third floor, spreading through the old wiring into the maternity wing. The alarms. The evacuation. The nursery —
But that night there was only the phone, and Richard's voice from the hallway, low and wrong, and then Richard in the bedroom doorway saying, "There's been a fire at the hospital," and the world tilting sideways, and Eleanor already pulling on her coat over her nightgown, already running.
The hospital glowed. That was what she remembered most — Saint Anne's glowing from the inside like a lantern, the third floor lit orange against the black sky, and the street full of fire trucks, and the terrible, orderly chaos of stretchers and blankets and nurses in paper gowns shouting names off clipboards.
She ran toward the building. A firefighter caught her around the waist. She screamed — she knew she screamed, she could feel it tearing her throat — and then there were hands, and a needle, and a voice saying, "Ma'am, you need to calm down, ma'am," and the sedative going in warm behind her eyes.
She woke in a curtained bay in the emergency department with morning light coming through the blinds and Richard sitting beside the bed, holding her hand, and she knew before he spoke. She knew from his face. Twenty-three years later she would still be able to draw that face from memory: gray, hollowed, older than the man who had left the house with her eight hours before.