Chapter 3 #2
The board filtered out at eleven-thirty.
Priya collected them in the lobby and herded them toward the cars that would take them to the next site — the Prakashes’ satellite facility.
I stood in the corridor outside the lab and watched them go and let myself feel, for exactly five seconds, the relief of a performance completed.
“That went well,” Theo said, appearing at my elbow. He was still holding the assay slides, and his wire-rimmed glasses were slightly fogged from the nervous heat. “Right? That went well?”
“That went very well. Your degradation answer was excellent.”
“I froze. I literally froze and that board member had to bail me out.”
“You didn’t freeze. You recalibrated. There’s a difference.
” I’d learned that distinction from Kinsey, who deployed it liberally during the early months of the divorce when I’d sit on the bathroom floor and call what I was doing falling apart, and she’d correct me: you’re recalibrating, Hal, there’s a difference.
Theo smiled, still nervous. “Dr. Metz took notes. Actual notes. Is that good?”
“Dr. Metz takes notes about everything. But yes, it’s good.”
He went back to the lab to clean up the stations. Rosa was already breaking down the data panel. I walked to the conference room to collect my things and realized I’d left my data folder on the table — the printed backup of the pediatric slides I’d brought in case the projector failed.
It was gone.
I stood there for a moment, looking at the empty table, and then I heard footsteps in the corridor. A specific cadence. I knew it the way I knew the sound of my own breathing — the measured stride of a man who had walked beside me through every hallway of every building in our life together.
I turned and Liam was walking toward me with the folder in his hand.
“You left this,” he said. He held it out. Professional, arm’s length, the way you hand something to a colleague. “Priya was loading the cars. I told her I’d bring it back.”
“Thank you.” I took the folder. Our fingers didn’t touch. I’d been careful about that since the handshake at the reception — an inch of buffer, always. One-second contact maximum.
He should have left. The tour was over, the board was waiting, Priya had the cars running. But he stood there for a moment, looking past me down the corridor, and said, “Your team is impressive. Theo — the postdoc — he’ll be publishing lead-author within a year.”
“I know. He’s the best hire I’ve made.”
“The data is strong, Hallie. You should get the grant.”
“I intend to.”
A pause. The corridor was empty. Lights humming overhead. The quiet of an academic building between events — no students, no bustle, just the building settling into itself.
“Your office—” He hesitated. He was looking past me, and I realized with a slow, sickening certainty that he could see into my office from where he stood.
The door was open. I always left it open during tours so the board could glance in and see a working space, not a closed door. I’d done it deliberately.
I had not thought about what was on my desk.
“I should drop this off for you,” he said, and before I could respond he was walking past me, through the open door, into the nine-by-eleven room that held my entire rebuilding.
I followed him. My heart was already climbing. I could feel it in my wrists, in the backs of my knees, in the cold that spread through my fingers the way it had in the parking garage and at the orientation — my body recognizing danger before my brain assembled the reason.
He set the folder on the edge of my desk, beside the laptop, beside the mug, beside the silver frame.
He didn’t see it right away. He placed the folder down and straightened and his eyes swept the room the way anyone’s would — the diplomas, the bookshelves, the spider plant, the window onto the parking lot.
Taking in the smallness of it, maybe. Measuring it against the corner offices and glass towers of the world he lived in.
Or maybe not. I was projecting. I was always projecting onto him, and I needed to stop.
His gaze came back to the desk. Landed on the folder. Slid left.
And stopped.
The silver frame. Fern at five months. Dark eyes wide open, one fist wrapped around the stuffed rabbit, the other reaching for the camera with the blind confidence of a baby who expected the world to come to her when she called.
She had his eyes. She had his jawline. She had the exact angle of brow that I’d traced with my thumb on Sunday mornings when we were still married and the light came through the bedroom windows and he’d sleep late and I’d study his face and think, this is mine.
He wasn’t breathing. I watched it happen — the recognition assembling itself behind his eyes like a puzzle falling into place, each piece clicking in with a sound only he could hear. The dark eyes. The jaw. The age — six, seven months, which meant born in the spring, which meant conceived —