Inside the silent penthouse, for the first time in ten years, the doorbell rang.
Chapter 2: Can I Kiss You?
Margaret Ellis answered the door because the doorbell was so unfamiliar a sound that for a moment she thought something in the kitchen had broken. She opened it and found no one there, and then she looked down.
The child stood on the threshold in a pink coat with a canvas bag over her shoulder, three years old at the most, with solemn eyes and a chin set at an angle Margaret recognized from an entirely different context: the angle of someone who has rehearsed. Behind her the vestibule was empty. The elevator doors were closed. There was no parent, no note, no explanation, only a little girl looking up at her with the calm of a small ambassador arriving at a foreign court.
"Hello," the child said.
"Hello," Margaret said faintly. "Sweetheart, are you lost?"
"No. Mr. Samuel bringed me." She pointed at the closed elevator as if this settled everything. "Mommy is downstairs. I have to see the man."
"What man, darling?"
"The sad man." She said it without hesitation, the way another child might say the tall man or the man in the blue house. "This is his house. Mommy said."
Margaret looked over her shoulder into the penthouse, at the long quiet rooms, and something in her chest moved uncomfortably, like furniture shifted in the dark. She should call down to the desk. She should call Samuel, call security, call someone whose job it was to make decisions like this one. Instead she stepped aside, and the child walked in.
Sofie proceeded through the penthouse the way water proceeds through a house it has decided to inspect. She did not run. She walked slowly, her small shoes making no sound on the floors, and she looked at everything: the vast white sofa that no one had ever spilled anything on, the piano with its lid down, the shelves of books arranged by a designer who had chosen them for their spines. She trailed one hand an inch from the furniture without touching it, politely, like a guest in a museum.
"It's too quiet," she announced.
"Is it?" Margaret said.
"Nobody lives here," Sofie said, with great certainty, and then, hearing her own words, she amended them fairly. "Only quiet lives here."
Cameron came out of his study with a folder in his hand and stopped in the doorway.
He was a man who had faced down boards of directors, federal inquiries, and the particular calm violence of men who move markets before breakfast, and he stood in his own home rendered entirely silent by three feet of child in a pink coat. She turned and regarded him. He regarded her. Somewhere in the apartment the antique clock by the fireplace ticked, startled, it seemed, to have witnesses.
"Who is this?" Cameron said at last, to Margaret, in the tone of a man asking about a weather event.
"Sir, she says Samuel brought her up. Her mother is in the lobby. She says she has to see you."
"Me."
"The sad man," Sofie said helpfully. She walked toward him, unhurried, and stopped a little distance away, close enough to study his face the way she had studied the furniture. Cameron found, to his astonishment, that he did not step back. He stood very still and let himself be examined. Her eyes traveled over him with a clinician's thoroughness. Whatever she was looking for, she found it, and her expression softened into something almost pitying, which on a three-year-old was an extraordinary thing to see.
"You're sad," she said.
Something moved behind his ribs, old and rusted. "Am I," he said.
"You are." She nodded, confirming the diagnosis to herself. "Your face is sad and your house is sad. Even the chairs are sad." She considered the chairs. "Chairs aren't supposed to be sad."
"No," Cameron said slowly. "I don't suppose they are."
She thought about this with her whole body, the way small children think, swaying slightly, her bag bumping her hip. Then she looked up at him again and asked, with the air of a person offering the obvious solution that the adults had somehow missed, "When I'm sad, Mommy kisses it better."
Margaret made a small sound that she covered with her hand.
"Can I kiss you?" Sofie said.
Cameron Hale had been asked for many things in that room. Money, mercy, signatures, silence. No one had asked him that. He became aware that his throat had closed and that Margaret was watching him and that the child was waiting, patiently, for an answer, because in her world you asked, and then you waited, and that was how it worked.
"Yes," he said. "All right. Yes."
He crouched down, slowly, feeling the unfamiliar mechanics of it, a man in a four-thousand-dollar suit lowering himself to the level of a three-year-old on his own rug. Sofie stepped in close, took hold of his lapel with one small hand to steady herself, and kissed his cheek. It was a brief, businesslike kiss, slightly damp. Then she patted the place she had kissed, twice, the way her mother must have done for her, sealing the medicine in.
"There," she said.
From the doorway, Margaret watched Cameron Hale's face do something it had not done in ten years. It did not smile, exactly. The hard architecture of it simply, for one moment, gave way, the way ice on a river gives way in spring, not melting, cracking, with something dark and moving underneath. His eyes closed. He stayed crouched there with a child's hand resting against his jaw, and he looked, for the first time since Margaret had known him, like a man who had been touched rather than a man who had been informed.
"Better?" Sofie asked.
He opened his eyes. "A little," he said, honestly. "Thank you."