Chapter 1
“Then why are you scared?”
Her fingers tightened around the paper.
“Her newborn hearing screening wasn’t completely clear in her left ear.”
I stared at her.
“That’s it?”
She looked almost offended.
“That’s enough when you’re her mother.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.”
Willa’s crying softened into small, hiccupping noises.
Sloan rubbed slow circles across her back.
“They told me it happens,” she continued. “Fluid, movement during the test, all kinds of harmless reasons. She reacts to sound. She turns toward my voice. Jenna dropped a pan last week and Willa nearly jumped out of her blanket.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
“So they’re repeating it?”
“Monday morning.”
“And you were going alone.”
“I have been going alone.”
There it was again.
Not accusation exactly.
Fact.
Facts were harder to argue with.
I looked at the appointment sheet.
Monday, 9:20 a.m.
The same time I was supposed to be presenting a three-billion-dollar acquisition proposal to our board.
For thirteen years, I had built my life around rooms where everyone waited for me to speak.
Now I stared at one sheet of paper and understood how little those rooms mattered.
“I’m coming.”
Sloan shook her head immediately.
“You have work.”
“I canceled it.”
“You canceled today.”
“I’ll cancel Monday.”
“Vincent—”
“I’m her father.”
The words sounded strange in my mouth.
Not wrong.
Just enormous.
Willa made a small complaining sound as if she had an opinion about my delivery.
Sloan looked down at her, and something in her expression softened.
I sat across from them.
“Is that all?” I asked. “Is that what you meant when you said there was something I didn’t know?”
Sloan hesitated.
“No.”
My stomach tightened again.
“There’s more?”
“Not necessarily something bad.”
“That sentence has never calmed anyone in history.”
To my surprise, Sloan laughed.
It was brief, tired, but real.
For half a second I saw the woman I had met seven years earlier in a crowded Chelsea gallery, laughing because I had confidently attributed a painting to the wrong artist.
She had corrected me without mercy.
I had fallen in love before dessert.
Then the moment passed.
Sloan shifted Willa into the crook of her arm.
“They asked about family history,” she said. “Hearing problems. Childhood conditions. Genetic issues. Things on both sides.”
“All right.”
“I knew mine.”
“And mine?”
“I realized I didn’t.”
Neither did I.
That bothered me more than it should have.
I knew my father’s blood pressure medication. I knew my grandfather had died in his seventies. I knew my mother had suffered migraines because, as a boy, I remembered entire afternoons when the curtains remained drawn and the house became quiet.
Beyond that?
Nothing.
My family had always treated illness the way it treated disappointment: privately.
“I called your father,” Sloan said.
I looked up.
“You did what?”
“I needed information.”
“You could have asked me.”
“I did ask you.”
“When?”
She gave me a look.
“During our marriage.”
That closed my mouth.
“You never knew,” she continued. “Every answer was ‘I think’ or ‘probably not.’ So after Willa was born, I called Charles.”
My father and I had spoken three times in the previous year.
Christmas.
His birthday.
The day my divorce became public and he telephoned to tell me that personal problems were easier to survive if one refused to discuss them.
It was, in retrospect, a perfect summary of the Gray family philosophy.
“What did he say?”
“At first? Not much.”
“That sounds like him.”
“Then I told him why I was asking.”
I leaned forward.
“And?”
“He asked if she had your eyes.”
That caught me off guard.
Sloan looked down at Willa.
“I said yes.”
For some reason, I had to glance toward the windows.
Manhattan stretched beyond the glass, all steel and sunlight.
“He went quiet,” Sloan said. “Then he told me your mother had partial hearing loss in her left ear when she was young.”
I turned back.
“What?”
“He said she wore a small hearing aid for several years as a child.”
“My mother never had hearing loss.”
“He said she did.”
“I would know.”
“You were nine when she died, Vincent.”
The room became very still.
There were things I remembered perfectly about my mother.
Her perfume.
The sound of bracelets at her wrist.
The way she cut strawberries into impossibly thin slices.
The blue scarf she wore whenever rain threatened.
But childhood memory was unreliable in strange ways. It preserved irrelevant details and erased entire rooms.
“She didn’t wear a hearing aid,” I said.
“Maybe not when you knew her.”
I looked at Willa.
She had stopped crying and was staring toward the tall windows.
“Did my father say it was hereditary?”
“He didn’t know.”
“So Monday might tell us nothing.”
“Monday might tell us everything is completely normal.”
Her voice said she wanted to believe that.
I moved to the sofa opposite her.
“Sloan.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to be afraid by yourself.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said quietly, “I got used to it.”
I deserved that too.
For the next two days, I discovered how thoroughly an infant could dismantle a life designed around efficiency.
Willa respected no calendar.
She considered sleep a negotiable concept.
She had no interest in whether a phone call involved Singapore, Zurich, or the chairman of my board.
By Saturday afternoon, I had learned three things.
First, there were apparently at least seven different reasons a newborn might cry, and experienced parents were only pretending to know which one applied.
Second, fastening the snaps on an infant sleeper was more complicated than restructuring a company.
Third, Sloan was better at all of it than she believed.
She moved through exhaustion with quiet instinct.
She knew which cry meant hunger and which meant discomfort. She could tell whether Willa wanted to be held upright or tucked against her chest. She sang softly without realizing she was doing it.
Mostly old songs.
Songs I remembered from our marriage.
On Saturday evening, I stood outside the nursery doorway and listened.
The nursery had once been my second office.
I had barely entered it since Sloan transformed it.
She had painted the walls a warm cream, added pale wooden shelves, and hung paper stars above the crib.
Nothing expensive.
Nothing excessive.
That was what surprised me.
Sloan could have ordered half of Manhattan.
Instead, the room felt handmade.
A knitted blanket lay over the chair.
Three framed illustrations leaned against the bookshelf because she apparently hadn’t decided where to hang them.
And beside the window sat the rocking chair that used to belong to my mother.
I hadn’t seen it in years.
“Where did you find that?” I asked.
Sloan turned.
“The chair?”
I nodded.
“Storage.”
“I thought my father had it.”
“No. It was in the basement storage room with your mother’s boxes.”
I stepped closer.
The wood was darker than I remembered.
My mother used to sit there reading while I built elaborate cities across the carpet.
I ran my fingers over the worn armrest.
“There was a box with your name on it,” Sloan said.
“What?”
“In storage.”
“Why were you going through my mother’s things?”
She gave me a level look.
“I wasn’t snooping. I needed somewhere to put the bassinet box. Your storage room looked like an archaeological site.”
Fair.
“There were four cartons labeled Evelyn,” she continued. “One said Vincent.”
“And you opened it?”
“No.”
That surprised me.
May you like
“Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t mine.”
