The bag was the kind sold for a dollar at pharmacy counters, canvas gone soft with washing, and Sofie worked its drawstring open with the slow determination of a safecracker. Cameron watched her small fingers and felt his heart begin to misbehave in his chest for no reason he could name, which was a lie; he could name it. Everything this child had done since she crossed his threshold had walked in a straight line toward something, and some animal part of him, the part that had once read a police report in a hospital corridor, knew the line was about to arrive.
"Hold on," Sofie said. "It's in here. Mommy keeps it safe."
She drew out a small zippered pouch, the kind women keep in handbags for decades, and from the pouch she drew a twist of tissue paper, and from the tissue paper she unfolded, with ceremonial care, a hospital wristband.
It was old. That was the first thing. The plastic had gone the dull, faintly yellowed color that plastic goes when it has been stored in the dark for a long time, in a drawer, in a box of important things. The printed band was creased where it had once been fastened around a wrist far too small for it. Sofie held it out to him on both palms, like an offering, like communion.
"This is hers," she said. "Mommy said the sad man should see it."
Cameron did not take it at first. He looked at it lying across her hands and understood that his own hands were not going to be steady, and a strange, fastidious shame moved through him, that a child should see him shake. He had not shaken at the hospital. He had not shaken at the funeral that was not a funeral's truth, at the graveside, at the reading of reports. He had been, for ten years, a monument of not shaking.
He took the wristband.
The print was faded but legible, stamped in the blunt capitals of hospital machinery. A name. SOPHIE H. Beneath it an age, four years, and beneath that a date, and the date was the date. There were numbers men remember the way they remember the sound of their own name being called across a room, and the worst night of Cameron Hale's life had a date, and he was holding it between his finger and thumb, attached to a band cut from the wrist of his daughter in a hospital outside Boston while he was still fighting closed bridges and grounded planes to reach her.
His hands shook. There was nothing to be done about it. The band trembled between them and the faded letters blurred and sharpened.
"Where did your mother get this?" he said, and his voice came out wrong, scraped.
"Mommy keeps it in the special box." Sofie watched his face with open concern, as if the medicine were not working as advertised. "With the important things. She keeps it a long, long time. Since I was zero."
"Since before you were born," Margaret said behind him, and Cameron turned.
Margaret Ellis had gone the color of the walls. She was staring at the wristband with an expression he had never seen on her in all the years of her careful, invisible service, not grief and not shock, but recognition, the recognition of a person who has seen an object before, or seen its kind, in a place she had spent nine years not describing to anyone. Her hand had risen to her throat and closed, unconsciously, around something small that hung there on a chain beneath her blouse, as if to keep it from being seen.
"Margaret," Cameron said.
"It's a hospital band," she said, too quickly. "From St. Vincent's, by the look of it. Sir, that band is ten years old." She rallied, visibly, the way a wall rallies before it finishes falling. "Children carry talismans. Her mother may have kept it for any reason. It doesn't have to mean-"
"Mean what?" Cameron said.
She stopped. The silence of the penthouse came down around all three of them like water closing over a stone. Sofie, sensing weather she could not interpret, leaned her small weight against Cameron's leg without asking, the casual trust of the very young, and he felt the warmth of her through the wool of his trousers and did not move away.
He looked down at the band again. He had held, at various times in the last decade, contracts worth more than some nations. His signature had moved money across oceans. Nothing he had ever held had weighed what this weighed. A hospital does not give out wristbands as souvenirs. A band like this came off a patient's wrist in one of a very few ways, and afterward it belonged to the chart, to the evidence bag, to the effects envelope that a nurse with shaking hands seals in a room where a family is screaming down the corridor. It did not belong, ten years later, in a zippered pouch in a three-year-old's canvas bag, unless someone had carried it out of that hospital on the worst night of her life and kept it in a box of important things ever since, waiting.
Waiting for what, he thought. For the child to be old enough to carry it up forty floors.
"Why?" he said, mostly to himself. "Why would your mother keep this?"
Sofie looked up at him, surprised by the question, as if he had asked why the sky kept the sun. "Because it's hers," she said, pointing at the photograph. "And Mommy was there."
Chapter 5: The Name Naomi
He made her sit down, in the end, because his own legs were recommending it. Sofie climbed into one of the vast armchairs and vanished into its cushions up to her waist, swinging her feet above the floor, the wristband back in its tissue in her lap because Cameron had given it back to her without thinking, the way you hand a live coal to the only person in the room wearing gloves. He sat across from her. Margaret remained standing by the fireplace, one hand still at her throat, and Cameron registered, in the distant managerial part of his mind, that Margaret Ellis had not offered anyone tea, which in eleven years of catastrophes large and small had never once happened.