Around the same time, Evelyn Mercer came back from the dead in public, which is a louder business than coming back in a train station. There were headlines. Cameron hated every one of them with a completeness that almost felt nostalgic. His mother-in-law, buried fifteen years, photographed alive at a charity luncheon, and the press of two continents competing to be wrong about his family in the most interesting available way. He learned to endure it the way you learn to endure weather in a house you intend to keep living in. Evelyn, who had had fifteen years of practice at being nobody, moved through the attention with terrifying calm and occasionally sent him the worst of the articles with no comment at all, which Anna said was her grandmother's love language.
And Naomi became, without ceremony or discussion, almost family. Not an employee. Cameron had offered her a job once, early, crisis management dressed as kindness, and she had looked at him the way she looked at the envelope. Not a savior either. She would not carry that. She was the woman who brought Sofie to Sunday dinners and told Cameron his sauce was undersalted and fell asleep on his couch during films she had chosen. Sofie had a stool in the penthouse kitchen with her name on it in Judith's handwriting, because Sofie had demanded one and Judith had settled the matter with a paint pen.
It was not a transaction. It did not settle. Some evenings Cameron sat in the middle of it, the noise, the small girl narrating her entire day at full volume to a teenager who was only pretending not to listen, and understood that the awkward part Naomi had sentenced him to was not a punishment. It was the thing itself. It was the whole thing.
Chapter 28: Getting to Know Her
Anna did not move into the penthouse. This was announced early, by Anna, in the tone of a head of state notifying a foreign power, and Cameron, who had already had a room prepared in his head down to the color of the walls, dismantled it in his head and said, "All right," and meant it by the end of the sentence.
They got to know each other the slow way instead. The human way. Lunches, at first, in places she chose, which tended to involve noodles and no tablecloths. Walks that got longer as the weeks went on. Museums, where he discovered that his daughter could stand in front of a painting for eleven minutes and then say one sentence about it that rearranged the whole room. She discovered that her father knew almost nothing about art and had been buying it for thirty years, and she was merciless, and he took notes.
In Central Park she led him, one bright cold afternoon, to a hill he had known was coming the way you know weather is coming.
"You remember this," she said. It was not a question.
"You had a red bicycle," Cameron said. "You were four. I ran behind you holding the seat, and you kept shouting at me not to let go, and then shouting at me because I hadn't."
"And I fell."
"And you fell."
"You laughed," Anna said, with the gravity of a prosecutor entering evidence. "I have kept this for ten years, so I hope you're proud of yourself. I fell off my bicycle, I was four years old, and my father laughed."
"I laughed," Cameron admitted, "because you got up before I reached you, and you picked the bicycle up, and you informed it, personally, that it was in trouble. You weren't hurt. You were furious. At the bicycle."
She considered this. "That does sound like me."
"It was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I have thought about it, I want you to know, approximately once a week for ten years. It stopped being funny around year two and it never entirely started again." He looked at the hill, at the path where a small red shape had wobbled and tipped and raged. "But yes. I laughed. I'm keeping the grievance on the record. I won't ask you to drop it."
"Good," Anna said. "Some things a person should have to carry." But she walked the rest of the way down the hill with her shoulder nearly touching his arm, which had not happened before, and neither of them mentioned it.
The first time she came to the penthouse for more than an hour, she went and stood under the mantel photograph on her own, the way a person visits a grave in a country they used to live in. Four-year-old Sophie on her father's shoulders, laughing into the camera, Central Park behind them, the best Saturday of his life filed in a frame.
"She's me," Anna said at last. "I can see she's me. But she's not me now. Does that make sense? I don't want to be her. I had to stop being her to get through it. I just want her to still count."
"She counts," Cameron said. "She's the reason there's a photograph at all."
"Then I want another one." She turned around. "Not instead. Next to it. A new one. With everybody being horrible in it, ideally. Sofie mid-crime. You looking like that." She pointed at his face. "Exactly like that."
So there was a new photograph. It took four attempts and one was deleted by majority vote. In the one that survived, Anna was rolling her eyes at the entire proceedings, Sofie was most of the way up Cameron's back with her shoes still on, Naomi was laughing at something outside the frame, and Cameron was half-smiling the way a man smiles when he has stopped checking how he looks. Judith hung it herself, beside the old one, at the same height, and stood back and said, "There. Now the wall's honest."
The penthouse began, in those months, to lose its acoustics. Rooms that had carried a man's footsteps for a decade and given back nothing started keeping sounds instead: a teenager's music leaking under a door she had not moved into but had begun leaving things behind in, a small girl's negotiations at full volume, the clatter of people who expected to be fed. Cameron caught himself, one evening, standing in his own hallway listening to his home be loud, doing nothing about it, in no hurry at all.