CHAPTER NINE
NORA
He came to her on the sixth Saturday with a folder.
She saw it when he arrived and understood without being told what it contained.
She put Felix down with his trucks and they sat at the kitchen table and she waited.
“Camille,” he said.
She looked at the folder.
“I went to her,” he said. “Last week. I’d been trying to decide whether to ask her to meet you and I realized I was waiting until I felt ready and I’m never going to feel ready for this so I went.
” He paused. “She admitted everything. Again. The full account. And this time—” He opened the folder. “This time I recorded it.”
Nora looked at him.
“Why?” she said.
“Because you deserved the truth from the source,” he said.
“Not through me. Not through David’s second-hand account.
Her voice, saying what she did.” He held her gaze.
“You don’t have to listen to it. You can do whatever you want with it or nothing.
It’s yours.” He paused. “But if you ever needed proof — for any reason — the document version is in the back.”
She looked at the folder.
She thought about the night of the gala. Camille at Roman’s shoulder, her hand on his arm, watching him sign. Witnessing.
She thought about the call three weeks before: think carefully about your place in his life.
She picked up the folder.
She held it.
“Did she apologize?” Nora said.
“Yes,” Roman said. “Eventually.”
“What did it sound like?”
He looked at the table.
“Like someone who understood what they’d done and was sorry for the consequences,” he said. “Not sorry for the decision.”
Nora looked at him.
“She’d make the same choice again,” Nora said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think—” He stopped. “I think she understood, at some point in the conversation, that Felix existed. I hadn’t told her before. When she understood there was a child—” He paused. “Something changed.”
“Changed how?”
“She cried,” he said. “She asked if she could—” He stopped. “She asked if she could meet him. Someday.”
Nora looked at the window.
A child needed grandparents. Family. The specific density of people who were connected to them by blood and history. She knew that. She’d grown up with the whole family structure intact and she knew what it gave a person.
She also knew what Camille had done.
“Not yet,” she said. “Maybe not ever. I don’t know.”
“I told her that,” he said. “I told her the timeline was yours.”
She looked at him.
He’d told his sister the timeline was Nora’s.
She thought about that.
She thought about what it had cost him to go to Camille and do this — the woman who’d held him together after their parents died, who’d been his family for fifteen years. Who’d made a terrible choice and loved him in the wrong way.
“Roman,” she said.
“Yes.”
“What did you say to her? When she admitted it?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“I told her that I loved her,” he said. “And that she’d done something irreparable and that I wasn’t—” He stopped.
“I wasn’t ready to let her back into my life the way she’d been before.
And that Felix was the clearest proof I had that the world she tried to prevent had better things in it than the one she was protecting. ”
Nora looked at her hands.
She thought: that was the right thing to say.
She thought: he found the right thing.
“Okay,” she said.
She picked up the folder.
She put it in the drawer beside the kitchen table — the drawer where she kept important documents, the one with Felix’s birth certificate and the lease and the things that needed to exist permanently.
“Okay,” she said again.
Felix came to the kitchen doorway with a truck in each hand, holding them up like he was presenting evidence.
“Baba,” he said, looking at Roman.
Roman looked at Nora.
“He’s decided,” she said.
Something moved through Roman’s face.
“Apparently,” he said.
Felix crossed the kitchen and held out one truck.
Roman took it.
Felix looked satisfied. He went back to his trucks.
Roman held the truck in his hands.
Nora looked at the drawer where the folder was.
She thought: complete information. From now on.
She thought: we’re getting there.