Chapter 2

I had spent most of my life arranging matters so that nobody could demand very much of me.

People called that selfishness. I generally found the accusation saved time.

Before I married Richard Cole, I told him I did not want children. I told him early, and I told him plainly. Several men before him had decided this made me unsuitable. Richard took three days to consider it, then said he loved me more than he wanted a family.

I believed him.

A month after the wedding, I discovered I was pregnant.

When I confronted him, he would not meet my eyes. He admitted he had tampered with our contraception. Then, once the confession was out, he seemed almost offended by my reaction.

“You're my wife now,” he said. “Did you think that meant we were going to live like people on vacation forever?”

I asked for a divorce.

His pleasant voice vanished. His family closed around him. There were threats, apologies, promises that turned back into threats. I tried to regain control of a situation everyone else insisted had already been decided.

By the time I stopped fighting the pregnancy, exhaustion had something to do with it. So did the knowledge that the child had made none of these choices.

Neither feeling made me forgive his father.

A month after Daniel was born, I left. The eventual divorce gave Richard primary custody. I had money for a lawyer and money to live on; I was luckier than many women, and still the whole business left me feeling that my life had been taken apart and returned with pieces missing.

I went back to being Evelyn Mercer. Daniel stayed a Cole.

I did not take the baby with me.

There is no prettier way to write that sentence.

Richard wanted an heir. His parents wanted a grandson. I knew what I had to offer a child then, and it was not enough.

That did not make the decision painless. It made it mine.

Whatever they told Daniel about me, he grew up believing it. We had little contact. When he married, I sent him a hundred thousand dollars with a note that tried, rather clumsily, to acknowledge the years I had not been there.

After that, he remembered my telephone number.

When Richard and his parents died, Daniel began calling more often. We moved from being strangers to being polite acquaintances with shared blood. I met Rachel. I met their little girl. I bought birthday presents selected by assistants and asked questions whose answers I did not know how to remember.

I had never pretended this amounted to closeness.

Now that little girl stood in the kitchen, eighteen years old, holding a clean plate as though she had forgotten its purpose.

“Where does your mother keep the soup?” I asked.

“Second cabinet.”

I opened it. Neatly stacked cans, a packet of crackers, a shopping list in a handwriting I barely recognized. Rachel had apparently gone away to help an aunt. That was the story Daniel had given Anna.

I knew the woman was dead.

I did not know how to tell her daughter.

Anna set the plate down and rubbed at a mark that wasn't there.

“Grandma, I'm sorry.”

“You haven't done anything.”

She looked at me then, and I had the uncomfortable impression she knew more about me than I did about her.

“You don't understand,” she said. “It's about what happened afterward.”