CHAPTER THREE
NORA
Kim called on a Wednesday.
“He called the firm,” Kim said. “He wants your number.”
“I know.” Nora was at her drawing table, Felix asleep in the next room, the afternoon light doing its particular thing through the east window. “What did you tell him?”
“That I’d pass it along.” A pause. “Nora. You have to know he’s going to come regardless of whether you give him the number. He’s a man who found you through an adaptation deal that was never supposed to surface his name.”
“He didn’t find me through the deal,” Nora said. “The deal found me. He saw it and—” She stopped. “He already had my address, probably. He’s been looking.”
“Do you know that?”
“I know him,” she said.
She put down her pencil.
She looked at the panel she’d been drawing — the latest work, the new book, which was about a woman who had a child alone and understood something new about herself through it.
Not the original Midnight Hours sequel she’d planned.
Something more complicated. Something she was still finding the shape of.
“Give him my number,” she said.
“Nora—”
“He already knows where I am,” she said. “He’s already done the math. If I make him come to the door cold, that’s—” She stopped. “That’s not how I want to handle it.”
“How do you want to handle it?”
She looked at her drawing table.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But on my terms, not because he tracked down my door.”
Kim gave him the number.
He called at eight that evening.
She’d put Felix down at seven-thirty and was sitting in the kitchen with tea when the unknown number appeared. She looked at it for two full rings.
She answered.
“Nora.” His voice. Just her name, nothing else, and her body did the thing she’d been working for two years at managing — the specific, involuntary recognition, the way her whole nervous system adjusted when it identified him. Like tuning to a frequency.
“Roman,” she said.
A pause.
“Thank you for answering,” he said.
“Thank you for calling first,” she said.
“I wanted to—” He stopped. “I know I’m the last person who should be asking for a meeting. I know that. But there are things I need to say to you and I’d rather say them in person.” A pause. “I can come to Brooklyn.”
“When?”
“Whenever you say.”
She looked at the wall.
She thought about Felix asleep in the next room.
She thought: he is going to come and he is going to see Felix and the world is going to change again.
“Saturday,” she said. “Ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
A silence.
“Nora.” His voice had changed. Quieter. “The book.”
She held the phone.
“The acknowledgment,” he said. “F.” He stopped. “I need to know.”
She closed her eyes.
She said: “Come Saturday. I’ll tell you everything Saturday.”
He breathed.
“Okay,” he said.
She hung up.
She sat in the kitchen for a long time.
Then she went to Felix’s room and stood in the doorway and looked at him in his crib — dark hair, dark eyes closed, impossibly small in the way he still was when he was asleep, not the roaring force of eighteen months of personhood but just a child.
Her child.
Their child.
She pressed her hand to the door frame.
She breathed.
She said, very quietly: “Here we go.”
Saturday arrived the way Saturdays do when something important is scheduled for them: slowly, heavily, with too much morning before ten o’clock.
She’d told herself she wasn’t going to prepare. He was coming. He’d see what he’d see.
She cleaned the apartment anyway. Not for him. For herself — the need to have things in order when the disorder came.
Felix woke at seven and ate his breakfast and said more eleven times and played with his blocks and was entirely, completely himself, which was the most destabilizing thing about him. He didn’t know anything was different about today.
He would never know a time before whatever happened next.
She was thinking about that when the doorbell rang.
Ten o’clock exactly.
She picked up Felix.
She opened the door.
Roman Vale was on her doorstep in a dark coat with his hands at his sides and his face — she did the inventory she’d told herself not to do, couldn’t help it, two years of not seeing him and there he was — his face was older.
Not dramatically. Just older in the way of someone who’d been through something that didn’t leave a visible mark but changed the weight behind the eyes.
He looked at her.
Then he looked at the child on her hip.
His mouth opened slightly.
Felix looked at him with Roman’s own dark eyes and said: “Baba.”
Roman went completely still.
“That’s not—” Nora started. “He calls everyone Baba. It’s his word for— it doesn’t—”
“How old is he,” Roman said. His voice was very quiet.
She looked at Roman.
She looked at Felix.
She said: “Eighteen months.”
He pressed the heel of his hand briefly to his sternum.
“Can I come in?” he said.
She stepped back.
He came in.