CHAPTER 27
Sebastian
The floor did not actually drop out of the world.
The marble held. The corridor stayed where it was, all glass and cold Parisian light and the far-off murmur of the gala.
Nothing moved. It only felt as though everything had been pulled out from under me at once, the way a magician pulls the cloth and leaves the china standing, trembling, on nothing.
The boy looked up at me.
Grey eyes. Not blue, not the soft hazel of a stranger’s child.
Grey: the flat, cold, particular grey I had spent thirty-seven years finding in mirrors and boardroom windows and the ruined faces of men I’d beaten.
Set in a small round face dusted with freckles, under a mess of hair the exact copper of a woman I had thrown away in a gallery four years ago.
I crouched. I don’t remember choosing to. My knees simply folded, and then I was down at his height, close enough to count the freckles over the bridge of his nose, close enough to see the hair was hers to the strand. My hand rose halfway toward him before I understood what it was doing.
“Are you lost?” I asked. My voice came out wrong. Too careful, like a man carrying something full to the brim across a room.
He considered me. Not shy, exactly. Sharp. Weighing me. He held a folded piece of paper against his chest with both hands, and I could see the edge of a drawing on it, a yellow shape with a great scribbled mane. A lion.
“What’s your name?” I said.
He studied me a moment longer, the way you study a door before you decide whether to open it. Then, warily, guarding it: “Theo.”
Theo.
And the arithmetic completed itself. It did it without me, the way the body keeps counting after the mind has begged it to stop.
Four years. She left in June. The empty ring on the stacked magnums, the phone that hadn’t held a single message from her husband all day.
Five weeks along, she must have been. She had stood in front of me in that gallery with her hand inside her clutch, and I had told her she was a chemist I could discard, and she had taken her hand out empty, and I had felt relief.
The hair. The eyes. My eyes. Every number landed together, and there was no rounding it away, no line item to bury it in.
My body understood before my mind would let the words up my throat.
My hands knew. They had gone cold and then very hot, and they wanted, god help me, to take hold of this small wary person and never let anyone carry him anywhere I could not follow.
Whatever I had thought grief was, whatever I had thought I’d already survived, it was nothing beside this.
This was a tenderness so violent it felt like being killed.
This is my son.
The thought didn’t arrive as thought. It arrived as weather, as flood, as the whole field in Grasse breaking open under me, except there was no sweetness now, only the terror riding beneath the tenderness like a base note.
Because if this was true, then everything I had chosen was true along with it.
If this boy with a lion in his hands was mine, then I had stood in a gallery and looked at the mother of my child and called her lucky.
I had set a flute down with a final little click and let her walk out into the dark carrying him.
Three of them had stood in that room. She’d tried to tell me. I could see it now with a clarity that felt like a blade going in slowly: her hand in the clutch, that terrible new calm on her face, the half-second she waited for me to become someone she could tell.
I had failed the test I didn’t know I was taking.
“That’s a good lion,” I managed. The words scraped. “Do you like lions?”
He nodded, unwilling to give me more than that, but he tipped the drawing half an inch toward me, just enough, and I saw the lion had grey eyes too, drawn hard with the pencil pressed nearly through the page.
I thought I would come apart right there on the cold marble, in front of a three-year-old who did not know me from any other tall stranger in a dark suit.
I wanted to say it. It was rising in me, unstoppable, the truest sentence I had ever nearly spoken: I think I’m your—
“Theo.”
Her voice came across the corridor like a struck match.
I looked up. And there she was. Adeline. Copper and green and four years older and more beautiful than my worst nights had let me remember, standing at the far end of the glass hall with a hand already reaching, her whole body strung toward the child between us.
“Theo. Come here. Now.”
He went. Of course he went; he knew whose he was. He crossed the marble to her at a run, and she folded him behind her thigh with one arm, fast, fierce, the way you’d pull a child back from a road.
And then she looked at me.
She looked at my crouched, ruined, wide-open face, and I watched the color go out of hers, and I watched her understand, in one clean instant, exactly what I had just finished counting.
She knew that I knew.