"Mommy. She came to our house. That girl. She sleeps in Grandma's blue room."
"Sofie," Naomi said faintly, "no, sweetheart."
"Yesterday," Sofie said, with the absolute authority of the very young. "She sleeps in Grandma's blue room. And she told me," the child said, turning her face up to Cameron, grave and shining with the importance of a message delivered exactly right, "she told me to kiss the sad man."
Chapter 13: The Suit Man in Gray
Naomi reached for her phone before the words had finished settling in the room.
"Sofie, baby, let me call Grandma."
Cameron's hand closed gently around her wrist, and she stopped, not because he had any right to stop her, but because of the way he said it.
"Not yet," he said. "Please. Not yet."
"You don't understand," Naomi said. "If my mother hears about this from anyone else first, if she thinks I've put that girl in danger by coming here—"
"I understand that if you call her, she will move," Cameron said. "She has been moving my daughter away from me for three years. If she thinks for one second that this room is unsafe, Sophie will vanish again, and this time I will not survive it."
Naomi pulled her wrist free, slowly. "You think I don't know that? You think I haven't lived with exactly that terror every day since I found her?"
"Then let me ask the one person in this room who isn't afraid yet." Cameron turned from her and lowered himself to one knee in front of the little girl, so that his eyes were below hers this time, so that she would not have to look up at him. "Sofie. I need to ask you something, and you can take as long as you want to answer. Is the big girl frightened?"
Sofie considered him with the grave attention of a judge. She pushed her thumb partway into her mouth, took it out again.
"Sometimes," she said.
"Of what?" Cameron asked. "Of Grandma?"
"No." Sofie shook her head hard, scandalized. "Grandma is good. Grandma makes soup."
"Of Mommy?"
"No."
"Of me?"
She looked at him for a long moment, and something in her small face seemed to weigh him and find the question a little bit silly.
"No," she said. "You're just sad."
Behind him, Margaret made a sound that was not quite a breath and not quite a sob.
"Then who, sweetheart?" Cameron asked. "Who is she frightened of?"
Sofie leaned toward him, and he leaned in, and she put her mouth close to his ear, the way children do when the thing they know is too big to say at ordinary volume.
"The suit man," she whispered. "The gray one. He comes and Grandma puts her in the blue room and we have to be quiet like mice. She doesn't like the quiet. She says the quiet is the bad part."
The room changed temperature. Cameron felt it happen rather than saw it, the way you feel a window open in winter. He turned his head very slowly toward Naomi.
Naomi had gone white. Not pale. White, down to her lips.
"Naomi," he said. "Who visits your mother's house in a gray suit?"
"I've never seen him," she said quickly. "Mom always told me it was a lawyer from the old days, insurance people, people from when she worked—"
"Naomi."
"Thomas Vale wears gray," Margaret said.
The silence that followed had a shape. Cameron rose to his feet without any memory of deciding to. Thomas Vale. Gray suits, gray ties, gray hair brushed back from a gray, courteous face. Thomas, who had sat across this very room ten years ago and held Cameron's shaking hand and said, We will find the truth, whatever it costs. Thomas, who had vetted every investigator, read every report, closed every false door with such tenderness that Cameron had thanked him for it.
"Thomas wears gray almost every day," Margaret said, and her voice was shaking now. "He has since he was forty. He jokes about it. He says decisions are easier when you never have to choose a color."
Cameron stared at the mantel photograph. His daughter, four years old, on his shoulders, laughing at a Central Park sky. Somewhere in this city that girl was fourteen, and she hid in a blue room and went quiet like a mouse when the man Cameron trusted most in the world came calling.
"My mother," Naomi said, half to herself. "I keep saying 'my mother' like she's a stranger to you. She isn't. You should know her name." She swallowed. "Judith Brooks. She was a nurse too, before me. Pediatric. She worked at St. Agnes for twenty-two years."
Margaret's hand flew to her mouth.
"What?" Cameron said.
"Judy," Margaret whispered. "Judy Brooks ran the children's ward on the night shift. She trained half the nurses in that building. She trained—" She stopped. Her eyes filled. "She was there the year I started. She was there the year Sophie disappeared. God help us, Cameron, Judy Brooks was one of the kindest women I ever knew, and she never once—" Her voice broke apart entirely. "Eleven years I've made your tea in this kitchen and I never knew her daughter was the nurse. I never knew Judy had a daughter at all until today."
Cameron looked at the three of them, one by one: the nurse who had promised his daughter he was coming; the nanny who had been planted in his house by his own father; and a three-year-old girl who had walked into his silence and kissed it. And now a fourth woman, a grandmother in Queens, who had hidden his child in a blue room and told her to be quiet like a mouse.
"How many?" he said quietly. "How many adults knew where my daughter was, while I stood in this room and rotted? Count them for me, Naomi. I want the number."
Naomi held his gaze, and to her credit she did not flinch.