Chapter 6: The Drive to Connecticut
They went out through the laundry room.
Sarah carried Lily on her hip with the backpack over her shoulder, moving fast but not running — running scared a child, and a scared child made noise.
Adrian was behind them, Vincent ahead, and two of Vincent's men flanked the service exit into the alley where a black SUV was already running.
Lily had been told they were going on a surprise trip.
She had asked if there would be a pool.
Vincent had said probably.
She had accepted this and was now asking Adrian, in a low and serious voice, whether bears could actually get lost the way the book said or if that was just a story thing.
"They can get lost," Adrian said, keeping his voice easy.
"But they're very good at finding their way back."
"Because of their nose?"
"Partly the nose.
Partly because they remember where home is."
Lily considered this.
"How do they remember?"
"They just do," Adrian said.
"Some things you remember without trying."
Sarah buckled Lily into the middle seat.
Adrian got in on one side, Sarah on the other.
Vincent took the front passenger seat and the driver — a quiet man named Reyes who had worked for Adrian for seven years — pulled out of the alley without being told twice.
They were three blocks away before Lily noticed they hadn't gone past the front of her building.
"We went the back way," she said.
"Faster," Sarah said.
Lily looked at Adrian.
He met her eyes and held them, and whatever she was looking for, she seemed to find enough of it, because she turned back to the window and watched the city slide past without asking anything else.
The drive to Connecticut was two hours and twenty minutes.
For the first forty minutes, Lily talked — about the bear book, about a girl at daycare named Priya who had a hamster, about whether Connecticut had different clouds than New York.
Adrian answered everything.
Sarah watched him do it and felt something she hadn't expected: not relief, not vindication, but something simpler.
He was good at this.
He was naturally, instinctively good at talking to her.
At the one-hour mark, Lily fell asleep against Adrian's good arm.
He didn't move.
Didn't shift.
Sat completely still for the remaining hour and twenty minutes with his daughter's weight against his shoulder and his eyes on the road ahead.
Sarah watched him for a while.
Then she looked out her own window.
"She does that," Sarah said quietly.
"Falls asleep on people.
She's always done it."
"I know," Adrian said.
Then, after a pause: "I saw it once.
At the grocery store.
She fell asleep in the cart and you were trying to finish shopping without waking her up." A beat.
"You were buying orange crackers."
Sarah turned to look at him.
"That was eighteen months ago," she said.
"Yes."
"You were there."
"I was across the street.
In a car." He didn't look at her.
"I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like a man who couldn't stay away."
"It sounds like a man who made a very poor substitute for actually being present."
Sarah was quiet for a moment.
"How many times?"
"More than I should tell you right now."
She looked back out the window.
"Tell me anyway."
He did.
Quietly, without drama — the grocery store, the park on 72nd Street where Lily had learned to use the slide, the morning of her third birthday when Sarah had taken her for a cupcake at the bakery on Columbus and Adrian had sat at the counter two seats down and ordered coffee he didn't drink.
The afternoon Lily had fallen on the sidewalk outside the daycare and cried, and Adrian had been parked half a block away and had had to sit on his hands to stop himself from getting out of the car.
"That one was the hardest," he said.
"She was fine," Sarah said.
"Scraped her knee.
She stopped crying in about two minutes."
"I know.
I waited."
Sarah didn't say anything for a while.
Outside, the city had given way to highway, and the highway was giving way to trees.
"I'm not going to tell you it was enough," she said finally.
"Watching from a distance.
I'm not going to tell you it was the same as being there."
"I know."
"But I'm also not going to tell you it was nothing." She paused.
"She has a father who has been paying attention for three years.
That's not nothing."
Adrian looked down at Lily's sleeping face.
"No," he said.
"It's not enough either."
"No," Sarah agreed.
"It's not."
They drove in silence for a while after that — not the uncomfortable kind, but the kind that comes after something true has been said and both people are letting it settle.
Vincent's voice came from the front seat.
"Twenty minutes out."
Adrian nodded.
Then his phone buzzed.
He looked at the screen.
His expression changed.
"What?" Sarah said.
He turned the phone so she could see it.
It was a photograph.
Taken from street level, through a car window.
The angle was slightly blurred, the way a phone camera blurs when the photographer is trying not to be seen.
It showed the back exit of Sarah's building.
The alley.
The black SUV pulling out.
And in the rear window — just visible, just enough — the silhouette of a small child.
May you like
Below the photograph, one line of text.
*She has her mother's hair.*
