"There were years you offered so much money that people lied to you for it," Anna said. "I read about those too. Strangers claimed they'd seen me, for the reward. Judy kept those articles as well. She said even the lies proved something. Nobody offers that kind of money for a child they've stopped loving."
"I never stopped," he said. "I want you to hear that from me and not from a box. I never stopped. There were days I stopped being able to say it out loud. There was never a day underneath that."
"I know," she said, and stepped back into the hug, briefly, on her own initiative this time, quick and hard, the way a person checks that a door they closed is really shut. "That's why I'm here. That's the only reason any of this worked. You never stopped, and Judy never stopped keeping proof, and eventually those two things met."
Chapter 21: Both of Us Buried Someone
They sat on a bench at the edge of the concourse, because standing had begun to feel like a ceremony, and Anna had had enough ceremonies arranged by other people to last her several lifetimes.
She sat with one foot tucked under her, the way she had sat at four on the penthouse sofa, and Cameron had to look away for a moment at the sheer unfairness of a body remembering a home its mind had been robbed of.
"You came alone," she said. It was not quite a question. She was scanning the concourse again, the ramps, the balconies, the doorways, with that same disciplined rotation he had watched from twenty feet away. "Really alone. No men in suits doing that thing where they pretend to read departure boards. Nobody following us with their eyes too long. I've gotten good at spotting them. People think kids don't notice being watched. Kids notice nothing else."
"I came alone," he said. "It cost me an argument with the head of my security that I will be paying for at Christmas for years, and the police are several blocks away pretending to be traffic. But in this building, at this bench, there is no one here but us. That was the condition. I keep conditions."
"Judy said you would." She picked at the seam of her coat pocket. "She said, if he comes with an army, we leave by the Lexington doors and you never see me again, and that's his choice made for him. If he comes alone, he's actually listened. Maybe the first adult who ever has."
"The first promise I ever got to make to you," Cameron said, "I intended to keep."
Something crossed her face then, complicated and young, and she looked down at her hands.
"You should know what they told me," she said. "At St. Agnes. Because you keep looking at me like the mystery is that I'm alive, and for me the mystery was always the opposite."
"Tell me."
"They told me both my parents died in the car crash." She said it evenly, the way a person reports weather from a climate they have moved away from. "Not just my mother. Both of you. I had a head injury. I had these pieces missing, memories like a book with pages razored out, and the adults around me filled the spaces in with that. A firefighter story. A hospital chaplain, I think, or someone dressed like kindness. Your mother and father are gone, Anna. Gone was the word. I asked about it for a while, I think. Then I stopped. Children in places like that learn fast which questions make adults go sad and quiet, and you stop asking the questions that make your world sadder."
Cameron sat very still. On the bench beside him, his daughter was describing her childhood the way she might describe a foreign country she had once lived in, and he understood that for ten years he had not been the only one burying someone.
He had buried a daughter who was alive in Massachusetts.
She had buried a father who was alive in Manhattan, forty floors above a city she'd later learn to cross.
Both of them had stood at graves. Both graves had been empty in exactly the same way, and neither of them had known, and the people who had known had watched them grieve and called it protection.
"Every birthday," Anna said, "I used to do this thing. I don't remember learning it. In the home, and later with Judy. I'd think about what you'd have been like. I had the pieces: a man named Cam, a fireplace, a red bike. So I built a dad out of three pieces and some guesses, and on my birthday I'd tell the built one things. School things. When I was eleven, Judy finally told me some of the truth, the parts she could prove, and one of the parts was that the man named Cam might not be dead after all. Might. She wouldn't say more than she could prove. Do you know what it's like to un-bury somebody in your head? It's not happy at first. People think it would be happy. It's terrifying. Because the grief was finished. I'd done it. And then someone comes along and says the grave was a lie, and now you have to be a person whose father is alive, and you don't know how, because you built yourself the other way."
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's inadequate. It's going to keep being inadequate, and I'm going to keep saying it anyway, in different forms, for years. Starting here: I'm sorry you had to grieve me. I'm sorry no one in that place thought a four-year-old deserved the truth she could have carried."
"Judy had a saying about that." The small, dry smile again. "She said adults use the word everything when they mean the version they're ready to admit. 'I told you everything.' No. You told me the everything you could stand. She said it's the most common lie grown-ups tell children, and they tell it with love, and that's what makes it rot, because the child can't even be angry cleanly."