24. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
“Baby.” My voice arrives from very far away. “Go find Mrs. Fairfax for me. Ask her for a snack. I’ll come get you in a little while.”
Olivia doesn’t move. Children always know.
“You’re crying,” she says.
“A little. It’s okay.” It is the largest lie I have ever told, and I have told her a year of them. “Go on. I’ll come find you. I promise.”
She looks at me a beat longer, then past me to her father, who has appeared in the doorway behind her with his coat still on and his keys still in his hand.
Whatever she reads in the air makes her decide not to argue.
She turns and pads back down the hall, slower than usual, glancing over her shoulder once, the way she did the very first day.
Then it’s just the two of us, and the folder, and everything in it.
Callum’s eyes drop to my hands. “What is that?”
I get to my feet. It takes everything I have left, which is not much.
“How much did she cost?”
He goes very still. “What?”
“Olivia.” I’m shaking and I let myself shake. “How much did she cost you.”
“Nichole, what are you-”
“The seventeenth.” I hold the page up so he can see it, so he can watch me watch him.
“Four-eleven in the morning. Saint Anne’s.
A baby girl, healthy, voluntary surrender.
” My voice cracks straight down the center.
“That’s my daughter, Callum. That’s the daughter I told you died.
That’s the daughter I held for four minutes and mourned for six years, and she has been sleeping down the hall from me this whole time, wearing your last name. ”
The color leaves his face in a single wave, the way water leaves sand.
“That’s not-” He stops. Starts again, and I watch him do the math I did on this floor twenty minutes ago, watch it land on him piece by piece. The birthday. The age. The way she chose me in a room full of strangers. “That’s not possible.”
“It’s a birth certificate. It’s a placement file.
It’s in your filing cabinet.” I’m crossing the room now, or the room is coming apart, I can’t tell which.
“I have been changing her sheets and brushing her hair and holding her through her nightmares, and you have been paying me to do it. You have been paying me to raise my own child.”
“I didn’t know.” His back finds the bookshelf. His hand comes up to it like the room has started to tilt for him too. “Nichole. I swear to you. I did not know.”
“Your mother handed you a newborn three days after you signed a piece of paper.” The words come out of me like something with teeth.
“Three days. Do you have any idea how long an adoption takes? How many questions there are, how many forms, how many people who are supposed to make sure the mother actually chose this? And you got a healthy baby in three days and you didn’t ask a single one. ”
“Because I wanted her.” His voice breaks on it. “God help me, I wanted her so badly I didn’t let myself ask anything, because I was terrified of the answer-”
“So did I!”
It tears out of me from somewhere below my ribs, and it fills the whole cold beautiful room.
“So did I, Callum. I wanted her too. I was twenty-two and alone and I wanted her enough to walk out of my own life and I kept her, and it didn’t matter, because you had money and I didn’t, and that is the entire story of the world.
That is the only story there has ever been.
The people with money keep the things. The people without it are told the things are dead. ”
He doesn’t defend himself. That’s the worst part. He just stands there against his own bookshelves with his daughter’s file between us and takes it, every word, like each one is landing where it’s supposed to.
“Tell me what you need,” he says. “Anything. I’ll-”
“I need it not to be true.” My voice has gone flat and dead, the way it goes. “And you can’t give me that. Nobody can.”
Behind him, on the stairs, a small sound.
We both turn.
Olivia is halfway down, one hand on the banister, the rabbit hanging from the other. She didn’t go to Mrs. Fairfax. Of course she didn’t. She has spent her whole life learning that when the grown-ups get quiet and terrible, the safest place is where she can see them.
She’s looking at me with her enormous dark eyes - my eyes, my mother’s eyes - and her chin is starting to go.
“Are you leaving?” she whispers.
And this is the thing that finishes me. Not the file. Not the word voluntary. This. My daughter on a staircase asking me the one question I spent six years wishing someone had let me ask.
I go to her. I get down on the step below her so I’m looking up into her face, and I take both her hands, and I hold them like I held them the first day.
“I have to go for a little while,” I say. “Not because of you. Never because of you. You didn’t do anything, do you hear me? You are the best thing. You are the best thing in the whole world and none of this is your fault.”
“Then don’t go.”
“Baby-”
“You said you’d stay.” Her voice is climbing, cracking. “You promised. You said a while, and a while isn’t done-”
“I’ll come back for you.” I press my forehead to hers, and I breathe her in, baby shampoo and hospital and the sweetness underneath that is just her, that has always been just her, that I would know in the dark, that I did know in the dark, six years ago, for four minutes.
“I will come back for you. I have come back for you before and I will do it again. I promise you that. That’s the only promise I have left and it’s the truest one I’ve ever made. ”
Then I stand up, because if I stay on that step one second longer I will never stand up again.
I walk down the hall. Past Callum, who says my name once and doesn’t try to stop me, because he knows he doesn’t get to.
Past Mrs. Fairfax, frozen in the kitchen doorway with a plate of cut apples in her hands.
Out the front door, into the light, down the steps I climbed the first day with wet shoes and nothing to my name.
Behind me, in the house, my daughter starts to scream.
The same sound. The exact same sound as the very first day, the one that emptied this house of three nannies, the one no one could reach.
I put my hands over my ears, and I keep walking, and I do not look back, because if I look back I will run to her, and if I run to her I will never be able to do the one thing I have to do now.
Which is find out who did this.
And make them say it out loud.