Chapter 6 The Name on the File #3
He had been uncertain and he had allowed Anya to board a plane with him and find a hotel room and sit across from him in a car, and he had done it while wearing his composed exterior like a second shirt, and she had seen through it the way she always did, her eyes moving over his face with the particular attentiveness of a woman who had been watching him long enough to know what the absence of expression actually meant.
She had seen through it and had not pushed, and he had been grateful for that and simultaneously had understood, in some quiet register beneath the gratitude, that her not pushing was not the same as not needing to know.
He set down the fork.
He reached into his coat pocket and took out his phone.
The seventeen messages were now twenty-two. He did not look at them. He opened a new message to Anya and typed: I had a meeting with Harriet today. There's something I should have— He stopped. He read it back. He deleted it.
He tried again. There's something I need to tell you about the legal matter. It's— He stopped at the em dash. He sat for a moment looking at the dash, which he had apparently put there as a placeholder for the word he hadn't yet found. He deleted the message.
He put the phone face-down on the linen tablecloth and looked at the window and the rain in the stone urn.
He had told himself, in the kitchen of the opera house, standing with her hands in his and the night still outside the glass, that he was going to stop.
That was the commitment he had made, in the wordless way that commitments sometimes got made between two people who had already spent enough time in each other's silences to understand that words were not always the primary medium.
He had told himself he was going to stop holding the difficult things alone.
He had held the airfield alone.
He had held the plane alone.
He had held the car alone.
He had held this entire meeting alone, in a room with a view of Davies Street, while Harriet Fenn laid out the existence of a four-year-old girl in the Jura and he had managed every moment of it with the steady composure of a man who had forgotten, temporarily, that composure was not the same as coping.
He picked up the phone.
He opened his contacts.
He looked at her name — Anya — which he had listed without a surname when he'd added it, nearly a year ago now, because by the time he'd added it there had been no version of the world in which the surname had felt like necessary disambiguation.
He called her.
It rang twice. The sound of the rain against the courtyard window was the only thing in the room.
She picked up.
"Cassian." The way she said his name — warm, slightly surprised, the particular quality her voice had when she answered quickly because she had seen the screen and chosen to answer quickly — was a thing he had no architecture for.
It went through him like something at low frequency. "How did the meeting go? I've been—"
"I need to tell you something," he said.
The silence that followed was brief — a few seconds, the length of a breath being taken carefully. He could hear, faintly, the ambient sound of wherever she was: some room in the hotel, he thought, or perhaps she had gone out.
"Okay," she said. Not a question. Not alarm. Just the word, steady, the way she sometimes went very still and very present when she understood that the thing coming required that of her.
He sat in the private dining room with its walnut paneling and its stone urn filling with rain and the plate of food he had not eaten, and he opened his mouth to begin.
And he did not know where to begin.
He knew every fact. He had sat with Harriet Fenn for forty minutes and been given all of the facts in the precise, unadorned language that Harriet trafficked in, and he could recite them in order — the name, the death, the letter, the child, the timeline, the court inquiry, the solicitor in the Jura, the temporary guardian, the DNA process.
He had all of it. He had held all of it alone in a room with grey walls and a coat check and then he had walked through the rain to a dining table he was paying for by the hour and he had thought about every dimension of it with the comprehensive precision of a man who had taught himself, over twenty years, to be thorough.
And now Anya said okay and he could not find the first sentence.
Not because he didn't know the facts. Because facts were not where this lived.
Because the first sentence would have to be the true one, which was not there is a legal inquiry or I received a document yesterday or there is a child named Juliette who may be mine.
The first sentence would have to be the one that had been building since the fog-grey airfield in Bavaria, since the car and the look on her face when she'd read the name on the glass, since the kitchen at three in the morning when she'd described his own worst habit with perfect, accidental precision.
The first sentence would have to be: I've been afraid to tell you.
"Her name," he said at last, "was Delphine Marchetti."
He heard Anya go very, very quiet.
And he began.