Chapter 2
In New York, that name did not require a first name to be recognized. The Montgomery family had been a fixture of the city's financial architecture for forty years, the kind of name that appeared on building lobbies and charity galas and the sort of news coverage that was not about crime or politics but about the movement of large amounts of money between significant institutions. I had seen it in the paper a dozen times without paying close attention because it had never had anything to do with me.
Until eight years ago, Camila had never told me her last name.
The nanny was already steering the girls toward a black SUV idling at the curb near the park entrance, the kind of vehicle that is not just a car but a statement about the level at which a family operates. The girls went with her without resistance, curious enough about me to look back over their shoulders but obedient enough not to pull away from her hands. The park around us was full of the ordinary sounds of an October afternoon, leaves, distant voices, a dog somewhere, none of it touching the specific silence that had settled inside my head.
Before the door closed, one of the girls — Emily, Nora, or Claire, I did not know which — pressed her palm flat against the tinted window and looked at me with the clear, uncomplicated gaze of a child who has found something interesting and is not yet old enough to understand why the adults around her are moving so quickly.
The SUV pulled into traffic.
I stood on the path and watched it go.
The question that would not leave me was not the one most people would have asked in that moment. Most people would have asked whether those girls were mine. I had done that math already, sitting on the bench with the compass tattoo visible on my arm, and the math was not comfortable. Seven years old, maybe. The night in Seattle had been eight years ago. The arithmetic was possible in the way that terrible things are possible when the numbers don't prevent them.
The question I could not stop asking was simpler and in some ways worse.
If Camila had known, why had she never told me?
I went home. I sat at the kitchen table where I had sat every evening for four years since my wife Rachel died, in the apartment we had chosen together and that I had not been able to bring myself to leave because leaving felt like a second kind of erasure, and I looked at the compass tattoo on my forearm until the light changed and the room went dark around me.
May you like
Rachel had known about Seattle. I had told her early in our relationship, before the marriage, because I believed in honesty as a practice rather than an occasional gesture, and she had received it the way Rachel received most things, with the particular equanimity of a woman who understood that the person in front of her had a life before she arrived in it. She had never asked about Camila specifically and I had not volunteered more than the outline: one night, eight years ago, Seattle, a woman I had never seen again. We had married two years later. Rachel had died of an aggressive cancer eighteen months after our wedding, which was the defining fact of the last four years of my life and which had restructured everything around it into a before and an after.
I called the only person I trusted with something like this, which was my brother Owen, who had the specific quality of a person who listens before he advises and advises only when asked.
