"Sofie," he said. He kept his voice low and even, the voice he had used, long ago, for a frightened four-year-old in thunderstorms. "I need to ask you some questions. Grown-up questions. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Sofie said, with dignity.
"What is your mommy's name?"
"Naomi." She said it proudly, the way children say the things that are entirely theirs. "Naomi Brooks. That's my name too. Sofie Brooks." She paused. "Not the same as her." A small finger pointed at the photograph. "We have nearly names. Mommy says it's a funny thing."
"What does your mommy do, Sofie?"
"She's a nurse. She fixes people when they're hurted." The child's face arranged itself into seriousness again, the ambassador's face. "She was a nurse for her." Point. The photograph. "A long time ago, when she was little and the car crashed. Mommy was there. Mommy telled me."
The antique clock ticked. Cameron became aware that he was gripping the arms of his own chair hard enough to hurt, and he made his hands stop, finger by finger.
"Did your mommy tell you anything else?" he said. "About the girl in the picture?"
Sofie nodded, many times. "Mommy has a picture too." She said it as a confidence, leaning forward over the tissue in her lap. "Not a drawing picture. A real picture, from the hospital. She keeps it with the band. In the special box." Her voice dropped to the carrying whisper of a child repeating something she has been told is important and must not be garbled. "The girl in Mommy's picture has her eyes open. She's awake. In the bed, with the tubes. Mommy says she was awake after the doctors fixed her. Mommy talked to her. She asked for her daddy."
Cameron did not move. It is a strange thing, to be a man of forty-odd years and enormous power and to learn that the floor of your house has been sawn through while you were sitting on it. The doctors at St. Vincent's had told him, through a man whose name he still remembered, that his daughter had never regained consciousness after surgery. That she had gone quietly, without pain, without waking. He had built ten years on that sentence. It was the sentence he said to himself in the hallway outside the pink bedroom door. She never woke. She didn't suffer. She didn't ask for anyone.
"The grown-ups telled it wrong," Sofie said, watching him, almost apologetic. "That's what Mommy says. The grown-ups got the story wrong, and Mommy has the picture to show it." She regarded him with her head tilted. "Are you going to be more sad now? I can kiss you again."
"No," Cameron said. "No. Sofie, listen to me. This is very important." But the sentence would not form, because the question he needed to ask was too large for the room, and he became aware that Margaret had made a sound, and he turned his head.
Margaret was crying. Not decorously. She had not made a move to hide it, which frightened him more than the tears; Margaret Ellis hid everything, it was her profession and her nature. She stood by his fireplace with her hand pressed over her mouth and tears going down her face, and she was looking not at him but at Sofie, with an expression he would spend a long time understanding: the look of a woman who has carried a stone in her shoe for ten years and has just heard it named aloud by a child.
"Naomi Brooks," she whispered.
The name went through Cameron like a voltage.
"You know that name," he said. It was not a question.
Margaret's hand tightened on the small shape beneath her blouse. "I met her once," she said. "At the hospital. Years ago. Only once." Her voice kept catching, and she kept forcing it onward. "She was the nurse on Sophie's case that night, sir. She was with her in the trauma bay. The liaison told your office afterward that she was the one holding Sophie when she-" She stopped. The word would not pass her lips, and Cameron realized with a cold and spreading clarity that it would not pass because the woman who had repeated the official story to him, all those years ago, no longer believed the sentence she had been given to carry.
"When she what, Margaret?"
"When she died," Margaret whispered. "That's what they told us to say. That's what I was told she did. Hold her, when she died." She shook her head, slowly, miserably, at the child in the armchair. "But I never saw her. I never saw either of them. I repeated what the liaison said the way you repeat a weather report. And I have wondered-" She stopped again, and what she did not finish was the loudest thing in the room.
Sofie climbed down from the armchair, crossed the rug to Margaret, and patted her hand with grave concern. "Don't cry," she said. "Mommy's downstairs. She can tell it right."
Downstairs. The lobby. Forty floors below them, in the building's bright marble throat, a woman named Naomi Brooks was standing patiently among the coming and going, having sent her three-year-old daughter up alone with a dead girl's hospital band and a story the grown-ups had gotten wrong. Cameron rose from his chair. He did not feel the floor particularly. He looked at the child, and at Margaret, and at the mantel where his daughter laughed from his shoulders, four years old forever.
"Margaret," he said. "Bring her up. No. Wait." He stopped himself with an effort that was nearly physical, and crouched down once more, to the level of the only honest person in the building. "Sofie. One more question."