Sofie was fourteen and all knees and opinions, taller than her mother, taller than she had any right to be given that Cameron could still see, superimposed, a three-year-old in a coat too big for her standing in his elevator. She had homework she was avoiding and a phone charger she had already lost and the family's entire archive of grievances memorized, including the bicycle, which she cited as precedent in unrelated arguments.
The penthouse had photographs everywhere now, on walls that had once held nothing but money's idea of art. Books in stacks. Shoes by the door in three sizes and none of them in a row. The place sounded lived in. It sounded, on the good evenings, like a house.
Sofie found him in the kitchen, where he was doing the thing Naomi had taught him, badly, with sauce. She stood in front of him and arranged her face into an expression of great ceremony, and he knew what was coming, because it had become, over eleven years, a tradition neither of them was permitted to skip.
"Can I kiss you?" she said.
"You may," Cameron said.
She kissed his cheek, quickly, on her way past to the refrigerator, as she had done when she was three and solemn about it, and as she did now at fourteen with the solemnity replaced by speed. Some rituals get lighter as they get older. They do not get smaller.
Later, when the food was gone and Anna was arguing with Judith on the phone about a book, of all things, a book, whether it belonged to Queens or to the penthouse, a dispute with no possible resolution and no casualties, Cameron stood in front of the mantel the way he had stood there ten thousand times.
Two photographs hung side by side. In the first, a young father, dark-haired, unlined, with a four-year-old on his shoulders in Central Park, both of them laughing at a joke neither of them would remember. In the second, the crowded impossible one: a teenage girl rolling her eyes, a small girl climbing a man's back, a woman laughing at something outside the frame, and the man in the middle of it half-smiling, grey at the temples, entirely surrounded.
Beneath them, framed separately, in a frame Anna had chosen herself, was the old hospital wristband from the night of the crash. Faded. The printing on it barely legible now. Under it, in Anna's handwriting, the caption she had written when she was fifteen and hung without asking, the way she hung everything true:
BEING LOST IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING GONE.
People asked him, still, at dinners and in interviews he mostly declined, whether he was happy now, as if happiness were a verdict that had been handed down. He always disappointed them. He told the truth. He was still sad sometimes. The ten years were still lost; nothing was going to hand them back, not the trustees, not the record, not the law moving at its own pace. Caroline was still dead, and he still set out, from old habit, to tell her things before he remembered. Henry's choices could not be undone, and Thomas's silence was part of the family history now, a room in the house nobody decorated but everybody knew the location of.
He had stopped believing the sadness disqualified the rest. The sadness made room for remembering, and remembering, he had learned, was not the enemy of the loud kitchen behind him. It was the price of the people in it, and he paid it gladly, the way you pay for things that are worth more than they cost.
Anna called him most days. Sometimes it was only, "Dad? The blue sweater. Sofie stole it. Tell her." Sometimes it was a charger, a book, a recipe of Judith's, nothing. The nothing calls were his favorites and he never told her so, in case it made them self-conscious. Happiness had not turned out to be getting the lost child back. That childhood was gone, and pretending otherwise would have been another way of not seeing her. Happiness was this. Getting to know his daughter again, the actual woman, on her terms, one ordinary day at a time.
The family argued, eternally and without heat, about when it had all begun. Judith said it began with a letter left in an envelope marked MOM. Naomi said it began the night a nurse in an emergency room made a promise to a child who could not keep her eyes open. Anna said it began in the blue room, with a question a girl finally let herself ask. Sofie, at fourteen, said it began with her, obviously, and cited the kiss, and the room generally let her have it because she was, in a way none of them could quite disprove, right.
Cameron always disagreed.
For him the line between before and after was not a letter or a promise or a courtroom or a train station. It was a small voice in a silent penthouse, in a house forty floors above the city where a man had been sitting inside his grief for ten years with the doors locked from the inside. A child who had walked in past all of it, looked at him with the whole unbearable clarity of being three years old, and asked, "Can I kiss you?"
And he had said yes.
That was the moment, Cameron thought, watching his daughter laugh at something on the telephone and his dead wife's photograph keeping its place on the mantel and the band of paper behind glass that said what it said. Not the moment the silence ended. It had taken years to end, and on some days it was not entirely over. It was the moment someone first touched his grief without asking him to hide it first. The moment the lock, from the inside, made its first small sound.
That was when the silence began to break.