"More than you think," she said. "And fewer than you fear. And Cameron—some of them knew a version that isn't the truth. That will matter, later. I swear to you it will matter."
Chapter 14: The Church With the Clock
"Then take me to her," Cameron said. "Now. Your mother's house. We'll go quietly, no cars she would recognize, no—"
"No," Naomi said.
He stared at her. "No?"
"She isn't there." Naomi crouched and pulled Sofie gently against her side, one hand flat on the child's back, as if Sofie were an anchor she needed. "I was going to tell you. It's why I waited in the lobby so long, deciding. Sofie told me on the train this morning, and I almost turned around three times." She looked up at him. "She's not at my mother's house today. She went out. With Grandma. This morning, early."
"Went out where?"
"Sofie?" Naomi said softly. "Tell the sad man where the big girl went with Grandma."
Sofie's face lit with the pleasure of a person finally asked about the most interesting thing she knows.
"Church," she announced.
"Church," Cameron repeated.
"Big church." Sofie spread both arms as wide as they would go. "Big, big, big."
"My mother does not go to church," Naomi said, half to Cameron, half to the ceiling, in the tone of a woman re-checking a fact she has relied on for forty years. "She hasn't set foot in one since my father died. She lights a candle at home and argues with God from the kitchen. She does not—Sofie, baby, are you sure?"
"Big church," Sofie said firmly. "With the windows." She pointed upward with both index fingers, tracing something enormous in the air. "Tall tall windows. And stars."
"Stars," Naomi said faintly.
"And no Jesus," Sofie added, with enormous satisfaction. "Grandma said. Church with no Jesus."
Cameron felt the room listing under him in an entirely new direction. He looked at Margaret, because Margaret was the only person present whose whole life had been spent translating other people's households.
Margaret was already nodding. She was crying and nodding at the same time, and her voice, when it came, was the voice of a woman solving the last line of a crossword.
"Big windows," she said. "Stars on the ceiling. No Jesus, because it isn't a church at all, Cameron. It's a station. There's a ceiling painted with stars, there are windows forty feet tall, and in the middle of the floor there's a clock—"
"The clock," Sofie said, delighted, clapping once. "The big clock. She stands by the clock. Everybody meets by the clock, Grandma says."
"Grand Central," Cameron said.
The name landed in the silent penthouse like a stone into deep water. Grand Central Terminal. Forty minutes from where he stood. His daughter had spent the day—how many days? how many ordinary, unremarkable days over three years?—standing in the most public room in New York, in a crowd of three quarters of a million strangers, under a ceiling painted with constellations, beside the most famous clock in America, while he sat forty floors above Madison Avenue paying men to search Connecticut and Virginia and an airport in Toronto.
"She goes there with my mother," Naomi said slowly, working it out as she spoke, horrified at her own blindness. "Judy always said she liked the crowds. She said she liked to feel the city moving. I thought it was grief. I thought—" She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her forehead. "She was giving that girl a life. Anonymity in a crowd. Nobody looks twice at a grandmother and a teenager in Grand Central. Nobody on earth. You could hide anyone there forever, in plain sight, and the girl would still get to feel like a person in the world instead of a secret in a room."
"Why today?" Cameron asked.
"Because Sofie came up here today," Naomi said. "Because once Sofie delivered the wristband, my mother knew the secret was ending one way or another. She took Anna somewhere she could think. Somewhere Anna loves." Her eyes met his. "And somewhere, Cameron, with a hundred exits. If this goes wrong, my mother can have that girl out of this city in four minutes, and none of us will ever find her again."
Cameron absorbed that. He did not rage. He did not pick up the phone. He stood very still, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and almost steady.
"Then we do not make it go wrong," he said. "Whatever she asks. Whatever she needs. We do it her way, and her daughter's way, or we lose them both. Do you understand me, Naomi? I am not going to be the storm that blows that girl out of this city. Not after ten years of being the man who wasn't there."
Chapter 15: The Call From Thomas Vale
Cameron's phone lit up on the glass table before anyone had decided anything.
All four of them looked at it. The screen was bright in the dim room, and the name on it was the name that had been standing in the middle of every conversation for an hour.
THOMAS VALE.
Cameron picked it up. "Thomas."
"Cameron." The voice was warm, alert, already managing. "I'm sorry to disturb you at home. I wouldn't, except something has come across my desk that I think you should hear from me first." A pause, artful and concerned. "A woman named Naomi Brooks entered your building this morning. With a small child. Security flagged the name against the old files, and, well—Cameron, before this becomes a situation, I need you to listen to me very carefully. Do not engage with whatever she is selling. There were cranks after the accident, there will always be cranks, and the cruelest ones are the ones who claim to be—"
"How do you know she's here, Thomas?"
The pause this time was different. Thinner.