"You're welcome," Sofie said, and turned back to her inspection of the room, her duty discharged, while Cameron rose slowly to his feet and Margaret looked at the floor so that neither of them would have to discuss what had just happened.
But the child was walking toward the fireplace now. Toward the mantel. Toward the photograph.
Chapter 3: The Girl in the Photograph
She saw the photograph the way everyone saw it, eventually, because it was the only object in the penthouse that looked loved. Everything else in the rooms was expensive; the photograph was kept. Sofie stopped in front of the fireplace and stood on her toes, her face tilted up, studying the silver frame with the peculiar intensity she seemed to bring to everything, as if the world were a test she had been warned about.
"That's her," she said.
Cameron had followed her without deciding to. He stood a few feet behind her with his hands in his pockets like a schoolboy. "That's my daughter," he said. "Her name was Sophie."
"I know," Sofie said.
"You know her name?"
"I know her." She said it simply, still looking up. "That's her little. She's big now."
The room changed temperature. Cameron felt it the way you feel a door open somewhere in a house you thought was sealed. He chose his words with enormous care, the care of a man who has had this conversation in a hundred forms over ten years and survived all of them by refusing, at the final moment, to hope.
"Sofie. The girl in the picture died a long time ago. Before you were born. She was in an accident." He heard how gentle his own voice sounded and was faintly amazed by it. "So you can't know her, sweetheart. You might have seen her picture somewhere. That's all."
Sofie turned around and looked at him with an expression that was not argument and not defiance. It was correction. It was the expression of someone in possession of a plain fact being explained to them by a person who had gotten it wrong, and who would need to be set right kindly, because he seemed to be doing his best.
"She's big now," she repeated. "Her hair is long, down to here." She held a hand flat against her own back, low, where long hair would end on a taller person. "She's bigger than Mommy's shoulder. Her face is the same face, just bigger." She pointed up at the frame. "That face. Grown up."
Margaret had come quietly into the room. Cameron could feel her behind him, not speaking, and somehow her silence was louder than the child's voice.
"Children say things," Cameron said, to the room in general, and the sentence sounded as hollow as a drum. "They see a photograph and they invent. It's normal. She has a vivid imagination, clearly."
"I'm not 'magining," Sofie said, dignified and mildly offended. "I seen her with my eyes."
"Where?" The word was out before he had authorized it, and it was not gentle this time. It was the voice he used in negotiations when a number on a page was wrong. The child did not flinch. She considered him, and then she shrugged, with the vast vagueness of the very young, for whom geography was a rumor.
"Around," she said. "At the place." She turned back to the photograph as if the interview were over, raised one finger, and touched the glass over the laughing four-year-old's face, gently, the way she had patted his cheek. "Hi," she whispered to the picture. "I found him."
Found him.
Cameron stood in his silent living room and felt the whole structure of his managed, budgeted, contained grief shift half an inch on its foundations. Ten years of investigators flickered through him: the dossiers, the dead ends, the blurred photographs from airports and schoolyards that had each cost him a piece of whatever was left. He had taught himself, at great expense, that every one of those moments had been a lie his own heart told him. He knew the anatomy of false hope better than any man alive. He could recite it. He was reciting it now, silently, like a catechism, while a three-year-old touched his dead daughter's face through the glass and greeted her like a colleague.
"Sir," Margaret said quietly. "Should I call downstairs? Her mother must be wondering."
Neither of them moved. The question hung there, reasonable and impossible. Send the child back down in the elevator, back to her mother, back to the lobby and the ordinary world, and close the door on this strange small visitation and resume the silence. That was the sane course. That was the course of a man who protected himself.
Cameron looked at Sofie. Sofie looked at the photograph, humming now, barely audible, some tune with no words. He thought about the kiss, still faintly warm on his cheek, and about the word found, and about the fact that the child had not wandered in off the street. She had been brought. She had been sent up forty floors by a mother waiting patiently in the lobby of a building that did not admit the uninvited, to a man who did not receive visitors, and she had crossed his mausoleum of a home and greeted his daughter's photograph like a person fulfilling the second half of an arrangement.
People did not do such things by accident. Mothers did not do such things by accident.
"Not yet," Cameron said. "No. Not yet."
Sofie had wandered along the mantel now, inspecting the candlesticks, the small bronze horse, the clock. She trailed her hand along the edge of the shelf. Then she stopped, and a look of recollection crossed her face, the look of someone who has remembered the actual errand underneath the errands, and she turned to face him and began, with great concentration, to open her little canvas bag.
Chapter 4: The Wristband