Chapter 2: Five and Three Quarters

ADRIAN

“Sir, you have a complaint from a member of the public who describes herself as five and three quarters.”

Hollis set the tablet on my desk the way he sets down anything he considers dangerous, square to the edge and well away from my coffee. He has been my assistant for two years and was my father’s for twelve before that, and he still briefs me as if the hospital were an army base under attack.

“Point of origin is the Juniper Ward break room,” he said. “The sending account belongs to Penn, Isla, registered nurse, with a start date nine days ago. The tone is hostile, and the spelling is excellent.”

I read it once, and then I read it three more times.

“Hollis, do you still have the Danner file?”

“It’s in your bottom drawer under the parking garage contracts, sir. You have never let me move it.”

The ninth floor was dark except for my desk lamp. I sleep up here three nights a week on a couch my father bought to impress a governor, and Hollis has stopped asking me whether I own a home.

She had been in my building for nine days, six floors and one wing away, and nobody had told me.

“You’re straightening the pens, sir,” Hollis said.

“They were crooked.”

“They were not crooked when I came in.”

I put the pens down and turned the steel bracelet on my right wrist instead, a habit I have never been able to break. My mother’s family gave me grey eyes, a cowlick no barber has ever beaten and a gene that nearly killed me on an operating table when I was seven years old. The bracelet is the only part of that inheritance that comes with instructions.

“Do you remember her?” I asked.

Hollis did not pretend to think about it. “I remember Ms. Penn, sir. She was the night nurse who made you late for your father four times in one month.”

It was five times, and he was being kind.

I typed a reply, deleted it and typed a shorter one. It took four minutes, and Hollis watched every second of them.

“You made the governor wait eleven days for an answer,” he said.

“The governor asked me for money. This one asked me to fix something.”

He read the reply over my shoulder, which he is not supposed to do, and his eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. For Hollis that is a scream. “You asked her to bring her mother.”

“The complainant is five and three quarters. Somebody has to drive.”

He left me alone after that. He took the coffee with him, on the theory that I would not sleep anyway and should at least not be awake on caffeine.

I took my mother’s fountain pen out of the drawer and wrote small numbers on the corner of the desk blotter, the way I check a budget I don’t trust.

Isla Penn left Halbrook on the twenty-ninth of October, six years and four months ago. I know the date because I had been calling her number for eight days by then, and on the twenty-ninth it stopped ringing.

If the child was five and three quarters, she was born in May. If she was born in May, she began in August.

In August, Isla had fallen asleep on my shoulder in the on-call room with her shoes still on, and I had sat without moving for an hour so she would not wake.

I did the arithmetic a second time. It came out the same, which arithmetic tends to do.

Either that child is mine, or Isla Penn was in two beds that summer.

I had known her for eighteen months, and I did not believe the second thing. I had also never believed she would leave without a word, and she had.

I paid Gil Danner for a year and a half to find her. He sent me monthly invoices and one final report, which said there was no trace of her anywhere.

I looked at the email again. She had signed herself Junie.

Junie is short for something. I knew exactly one thing in Halbrook it could be short for, and I could see its lights from my window. The lakefront wing glowed at the far end of the bluff, and on its third floor, behind the second row of windows, was the ward my mother built the year I was born.

Did she name her daughter after the ward? Who names a child after the place where she was happiest and then runs two thousand miles away from it?

That was a question for a man with more information than I had. I did not sleep. At three in the morning I read the complaint again. At five I showered in the executive bathroom and put on a clean shirt, because a man should not meet a complainant in yesterday’s collar.

At ten to seven I was standing in the main lobby.

My father’s portrait hangs over the information desk, in oil and eight feet tall. He sat for it with his thumb along his jaw, the way he sat through every board meeting I ever attended, as if he were holding his face on. The painter gave him kind eyes, and nobody who knew him has ever forgiven the painter.

“Good morning, Mr. Cole,” said the woman at the desk, in the voice of someone wondering whether she was being audited.

“Pat, what time do the daycare parents come through?”

“They come between five to seven and ten past, Mr. Cole. You signed their budget.”

“I know I did. I’ve never watched them come in.”

“Should I call up to the ward for you?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, thank you. I’d rather she didn’t know.”

The east doors turned, and turned again, and at four minutes past seven Isla Penn walked through them.

She had a scarf wound twice around her neck and a pencil stuck through the knot of her curls, and she was looking at her phone and walking too fast, the way she always did when she was late. Six years had put a line between her eyebrows that I did not recognize. I recognized everything else at once.

She was holding the hand of a small girl in a purple coat.

The girl had a clipboard pressed flat against her chest with both arms, the way people hold a document they intend to present in court. Her hood had fallen back, and a tuft of hair stood straight up at the crown of her head that no clip in the world was going to flatten.

Isla didn’t see me. She was steering them both toward the daycare corridor and talking about mittens.

The girl did see me. She looked up past her mother’s elbow, straight at the tall man standing under the painting, and she studied me with total seriousness.

She had grey eyes. They were my mother’s eyes, and until t

hat moment I had only ever seen them in a mirror.