He wasn't sorry. Thomas had worked for me for nine years, and in nine years he had never once been sorry for anything I didn't deserve him to be sorry about.
Friday, Noah was outside the firm again. Saturday — mercifully — he wasn't; the office was dark and he seemed to know it. Monday he appeared at the sedan instead, waiting at the curb where Thomas parked between runs, his hands shoved deep into the coat's too-long sleeves. I watched from the lobby this time, telling myself I was merely assessing a security situation, the way I assessed everything: threat level, exposure, liability.
That was the lie I told that week. I was not assessing anything. I was standing behind plate glass in a two-thousand-dollar coat, watching a ten-year-old boy wait in the cold for the one person in my vicinity who had shown him a scrap of warmth, and I hated — hated — what I felt. It had a weight to it, like a hand on the back of my neck, pushing my chin down toward something I had spent nineteen years refusing to look at.
On Monday evening I called down and told security to let him stand there. "He's not a threat," I said. "Ignore him."
"Ma'am?"
"Just ignore him. That's an instruction."
I don't know what I was instructing them to ignore. The boy, or the fact that I couldn't stop watching him. I went back upstairs and closed my office door and worked until midnight, and every time I stood to stretch I found myself drifting toward the window, checking the empty sidewalk like a woman checking a wound for infection.
That night I dreamed about the hospital. Not the baby — I never dreamed about the baby — but the intake nurse's camera flash, white and sudden, and a voice saying "smile, honey," over and over, until the smile froze on my face and I couldn't move my jaw.
I woke at four and sat in the dark of my loft and thought about Daniel Reyes, which I had not done in years. His hands, washed three times before dinner. His laugh. The way he'd pressed his palm to my belly in the seventh month and announced, to the baby, that he intended to teach him to parallel park, a skill at which Daniel himself had been notoriously terrible.
I got up and made coffee and told myself the dream was just stress. Gane was circling the managing-partner seat like a vulture with good tailoring, and the Morrison deal was entering its third week of negotiations. Stress. That was all it was.
But when Thomas pulled up at eight and I saw the small figure in the borrowed wool coat detach itself from the shadow of the awning across the street and cross to the curb — not toward me, never toward me, just toward the car, toward Thomas — I felt the armor shift. A hairline fracture. The kind of crack you only notice when you press on it.
I pressed on it. It held. Barely.
"Drive," I told Thomas, without looking up from my phone.
Chapter 7: Priya Nair
Priya Nair kept her office at the temperature of a meat locker, presumably so that whatever she was about to tell you would feel, by comparison, warm. She was thirty-five, with a sleek black bob and a desk arranged at right angles, and she had the resigned competence of a woman who had been yelled at by grieving people for eight years and had stopped taking it personally.
"Ms. Vance," she said, "I shouldn't be talking to you."
"And yet you agreed to meet."
"I agreed to coffee." She slid a paper cup across the desk. Decaf. Insulting, but I drank it.
I had found her through the agency — the same agency, nineteen years on, now operating out of a low-rise on Lexington with a name that had been focus-grouped into something softer. Mrs. Halstead was long retired. The case file on Noah Parker was sealed by court order. But the system had leaks, the way all systems do, and one of them was Priya Nair, the caseworker assigned to Noah's file after the Parkers' deaths.
"Tell me about the fire," I said.
Her face did something complicated. "Two years ago. A house fire in Montclair. Faulty wiring, the investigators said — an old house, aluminum wiring, a bad splice in the attic. The parents didn't get out. Noah was eight. A neighbor got him out through a bedroom window."
"James and Laura Parker."
"Yes." She glanced at a folder she didn't open. "Good people. The file's full of the usual glowing reports — home visits, school records, the works. Laura ran a children's bookshop. She read to him every night until he was old enough to pretend he didn't want her to."
I looked at the decaf. "Three foster homes," I said.
"Three in eighteen months. The first was a couple in their sixties who meant well and were completely unprepared for a grieving eight-year-old. He set a trash can on fire in the garage."
I raised an eyebrow. "After what happened to his parents?"
"He told his counselor he wanted to understand what the flames looked like from the outside." Priya's voice was level, practiced. "The second home, the foster mother had three biological kids and a temper. She sent him back after four months — 'unmanageable,' in the report. The third was a group home in Newark. He ran away three months ago. He's been on the street or in shelters since."
"He's ten."
"I know how old he is, Ms. Vance. I've written his age on more forms than you've billed hours." She leaned forward. "He's been looking for you for a year."
Something in my chest misfired. "He's been on the street for three months."
"He started looking a year ago. That's why he ran, as far as we can tell — he didn't run from the group home, he ran toward something." She picked up her cup, put it down without drinking. "The sealed file names the agency's attorney of record. Old letterhead — Vance & Sterling. Somebody in the records office filed the counsel correspondence in the wrong envelope, back when your firm handled the agency's legal work. Noah's file mentioned the firm name in a context it shouldn't have."
"And you told him my surname."
The silence that followed was the answer. Priya Nair folded her hands on her desk and looked at me with an expression that was equal parts defiance and apology. "He was nine years old and sitting in my office telling me his mother in heaven wasn't his first mother, and that he had a right to know who was. What was I supposed to do, Ms. Vance?"
"Your job," I said. "Your job was to protect a sealed file."