He kept his hands where she could see them. He kept his feet planted. And he let his face do the one thing he had trained it out of doing in a decade of boardrooms: he let it show everything.
Chapter 20: May I Hug You?
She came the first fifteen feet herself.
Not quickly. She walked the way she had stood, unhurried, her hands still in the pockets of the blue coat, her eyes on him the whole way, measuring. Five feet from him she stopped, close enough now that he could see what the distance had hidden: Caroline's mouth, his own mother's stubborn jaw, and a wariness in her face that belonged to no one in his family, because his family had not raised her. Strangers and circumstance had. The wariness was theirs.
"You're older," she said.
Of everything he had imagined her saying first, across ten years of imagining, that had never once made the list, and it undid him more completely than any accusation could have.
"I am," he said. His voice came out rough. "So are you. You have a head start on forgiving me for that, I hope. I had no say in either."
"The suits are the same, though." A flicker at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, the ghost of one checking whether the room was safe. "Dark. All dark. Grandma Judy said you probably owned a hundred of them and they were all the same color as a funeral."
"Grandma Judy," he repeated carefully, "is an observant woman."
"She said you'd cry." The flicker reached her eyes this time, and gentled them. "She said you weren't a crier before, but you'd learned. She was right. You're doing it already and I haven't even said anything mean yet."
He laughed. It came out of him broken and astonished, through the tears she had correctly predicted, and for a moment they were just two people standing in a train station, and the ten years were a thing happening somewhere else, to a city outside the windows.
Then the moment passed through them both, and the real weight of it settled back down, and he felt his arms begin to ache.
It was a physical thing, specific and stupid and enormous: his arms ached to hold her. Ten years of ache, stored in the muscles like a debt. Every instinct he owned, every nerve, was shouting instructions older than language. She was five feet away. She was fourteen, and alive, and his, and five feet was nothing, five feet was a lunge, half a second, and the ache would stop.
He did not move.
Instead he said, quietly, "May I hug you?"
Her eyes widened slightly. She had not expected to be asked. He understood that, too, and it shamed and steadied him at once: how many times in her life had anyone asked this girl anything?
"You can say no," he said. "You can say not yet. You can say never, and I will stand here and be grateful for the five feet. Anna. It is entirely, completely your call. It will always be your call. That's not a line. That's the whole arrangement, from now on, for everything."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, small and decisive.
"Okay," she said. "Yes. Okay."
He stepped in slowly. He made himself go the speed of trust, which is the slowest speed there is, and halfway across the last of the distance, she stepped too. She came the final foot herself. He would hold onto that for the rest of his life: she came the final foot herself.
She was taller than the child in his memory and smaller than the woman in his fears, and she was shaking. He felt it start the moment she was against his chest, a fine, continuous tremor, like a held note. He kept his arms loose around her, deliberately loose, a frame and not a cage, loose enough that she could step out of it in any direction at any second and owe him nothing for leaving. He put one hand, carefully, at the back of her head, the way he had when she was four and the world had thunder in it, and he felt her breath go out of her in a long, unsteady rush against his shoulder.
"Hi," she said, muffled, absurd, perfect.
"Hi," he said. "Hi. Hi."
They stood like that while Grand Central flowed around them and the clock kept its bright time above them. Nobody filmed it. Nobody applauded. The city, which had taken everything from him in public, gave this back in private, in the middle of a crowd that never looked up.
"I'm sorry," he said at last, into her hair. "Anna. I am so sorry. I should have found you. I was your father and you were four years old and I should have torn the world apart and found you, and I didn't, and I will be sorry about that every day I have left."
She pulled back just enough to look at him. Her eyes were wet now, too, and fierce through it, and the fierceness was so exactly Caroline's that his heart turned over.
"You did search," she said. "Don't do that. Don't stand here in the first five minutes and do that. You searched. I know you searched."
"You can't know that."
"I can." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, impatient with her own tears, another inheritance. "Grandma Judy kept everything. Every clipping. Every article. Your investigators' notices, the reward posters, the appeals, all of it, in a box, for years, so that when I was old enough she'd be able to prove it to me. She said, a child who was taken should never have to take an adult's word that she was wanted. So she kept the evidence."
He could not speak.