Chapter 5 Five Years in Zurich

Professor Sommer's answer was one line long. Yes. Come Monday. Bring warm socks. I.S.

Four days later I carried two suitcases up three flights of stairs in Hottingen, to an apartment above a bakery that started baking at four in the morning. For five years I woke every night to the smell of bread and thought, for a second, that someone loved me.

The apartment had two rooms, a slanted ceiling, and a window that looked down a steep cobbled street to a slice of the lake. Helen's photograph went on the windowsill. The other thing I'd brought went in the bottom drawer of the dresser, folded in tissue: a small pale-yellow wool baby blanket, worn soft, with a gull stitched in white on one corner.

Helen had told me when I was nine that she wasn't the mother who'd given birth to me. She'd been given a baby to keep safe, she said, by someone who couldn't keep me, and she'd loved me from the minute she saw me. The blanket was what I'd been wrapped in. It was the only thing from before.

I closed the drawer on it.

---

Tamsin called at the end of April. I could hear her chewing.

"Okay. So. No charges." She bit into something. "The Calloways told the police they won't pursue it. Family matter, grief, everyone's terribly upset. Your ex handed over the vial and Vivienne Sutter's statement and then basically said never mind. It's in an evidence locker. Forever, probably, unless somebody's stupid."

"So I'm not accused of anything."

"You're not charged with anything. That's different. I'm a lawyer, I have to say that." Crunching. "Are you eating? You sound like you're not eating."

"I'm eating for three."

The crunching stopped.

Tamsin Reyes had lived across the hall from me in the graduate dorms in Boston, a law student who ate cereal at midnight and argued with the television. That morning, at the twelve-week scan in a dim room at the Kantonsklinik, the sonographer had moved the probe and frowned and moved it again and said, in careful English, "Ah. There are two."

"Absolutely not," said Tamsin. "Margot. Two?"

"Two."

"I'm coming. I'm booking a flight. Don't argue, I'll bring peanut butter."

The divorce went through lawyers. I signed what Carrow's office sent me and mailed it back. It became final on a wet Thursday in September. I found out between two cases and went back into the operating room and held a retractor for six hours.

---

In June I met Lorenz Brandt.

He was the pediatric cardiologist who did the fetal echocardiograms, tall and fair, with wire glasses and a manner so formal I thought at first he was making fun of me. He wasn't. He was thirty-one and spoke English like someone who'd learned it from very old books.

He spent forty minutes on the scan, going back to the same view three times. Then he turned the screen toward me.

"The girl is perfect," he said. "Loud, I suspect. She has kicked my probe twice."

"And the boy?"

"The boy's aortic valve has two leaflets instead of three." He pointed with the tip of a pen at the gray flicker. "Here. It is mild. It opens well. Many people live their whole lives with this and never know. One watches it. An echo once a year, perhaps. That is all."

I'd seen a hundred bicuspid valves in textbooks. I'd never seen one that belonged to me. I sat on the paper sheet and watched it open and shut while the gel went cold on my stomach.

"You are alone," Lorenz said, and did not make it a question.

"Yes."

He polished his glasses on his tie. "Then you will need a cardiologist who answers his telephone at night," he said. "I am told I am very irritating about it."

He was. He answered every call. He came to every scan after that and explained it twice, once for the doctor and once for the mother. He became the closest friend I had in that city, and nothing else. I wasn't looking for anything else. If he ever was, he had the manners to keep it to himself.

---

They weren't due for five weeks. Lorenz was at a conference in Basel, and I'd told him to go.

At half past one in the morning on the second of October, alone in the apartment above the bakery, I knew exactly what was happening. That was the worst of it. I timed the first contractions on my watch, called a taxi, and made it down three flights of stairs between two of them, holding the rail.

Pippa was born at 04:41, purple and furious, already screaming before they'd cleared her mouth. She had a full head of dark wet curls and a voice that carried down two corridors.

Felix came six minutes later, small and quiet and gray-blue, and for a moment he made no sound at all and the room went fast around me. Then he opened his eyes. He didn't cry. He looked.

They put them both on my chest, one under each hand. I counted their breaths without meaning to, as I'd count a patient's, and when I got to sixty I started again.

Lorenz came in that afternoon off the first train from Basel, unshaven, with a paper bag of pastries he apologized for because he hadn't baked them himself. In his other hand was a small box. Inside was a child's stethoscope, bright blue plastic, with a real diaphragm and real tubing.

"It works," he said. "I checked. For the boy. For later."

I asked him to be their godfather before he'd put the box down.

The woman on the first floor of my building was called Agathe Wyss. She was sixty-two, had raised four children and buried a husband, and she came up the stairs the day I brought the twins home with a pot of soup and simply never left. She refused to let me call her their nanny or pay her what she was worth. She sang to them in Swiss German. Pippa learned to argue in three languages. Felix learned to count in two.

---

On the eleventh of May 2023 I took the twins on the lake ferry, because it was sunny and the boat was the only thing that made Pippa stop shouting.

Across the deck, a tall old woman was staring at me. Late seventies, straight-backed, white hair in a knot, a black cane with a silver handle carved into a gull's head. She looked at my face, and then at my hands on Felix's back, and then at my face again, with the attention I give a scan I don't like.

Then she said something in French that no one says in church, and came across the deck, the cane cracking on the boards with every step.

"Pardon," she said. She was white to the lips. "Forgive me. You have my daughter's face."

Her name was Beatrix Whitlock. She lived in Bramport, in the house on the cliffs I'd seen my whole life from the harbor and never been inside. She came to Zurich every spring because her daughter had lived here once.

The DNA test came back in June.

---

She gave me the report in a hotel tearoom on a gray afternoon, with the twins asleep in their double stroller beside us. She didn't open the envelope. She put it on the tablecloth between the cups and laid her ringed hand flat on top of it.

"I read it in the car," she said. "I will not make you read it in front of me. I will tell you what it says, and then you may read it a hundred times alone."

"All right."

"My daughter's name was Celeste. She came home to Bramport in the winter of 1996 with a new baby. On the seventh of March her car went off the road at Gull Point in a storm. They found her in the wreck. The door on the passenger side was open." Her voice did not change at all. "They told me the sea took the baby. I believed them for twenty-seven years."

The tearoom clinked around us. Pippa sighed in her sleep and threw an arm over her face.

"The baby's name was Iris," Beatrix said. "Iris Whitlock." She took her hand off the envelope and pushed it an inch toward me. "That is you, chérie. That is who you were for eight weeks, before somebody carried you to Old Harbor and gave you to a nurse."

I'd known I was someone else since I was nine. I hadn't known it had a name. I said it under my breath, once, the way you test a word in a language you're learning. It didn't fit in my mouth.

"Merde," said Beatrix, and pressed her napkin hard under each eye. "I am too old to cry in hotels."

A month later her lawyer flew in, a precise gray man named Quentin Pruitt, and set out the rest in ten minutes. Celeste had held fifty-one percent of the Whitlock Trust, the family's private bank. When her baby was declared dead, that stake had passed into her brother's control as trustee. But Celeste's will said that if her daughter lived, she could claim it in person, on or after her thirtieth birthday. Until then, Pruitt advised, we said nothing to anyone.

"You would be, in effect, the controlling shareholder of a private bank," he said.

"I don't want a bank," I said. "I want to know what happened to her."

Beatrix put her hand over mine. "Then we want the same thing."

---

The rest went quickly. Years do when you're too busy to count them.

I finished the fellowship and went into surgical training under Ingrid Sommer. I developed a way of rebuilding damaged aortic valves instead of replacing them, for old and fragile patients who wouldn't survive a replacement. We published the patient series in late 2025, and people started calling it the Fairley repair. In December a man called Winston Okafor phoned from St. Ansel Memorial in Bramport and asked if I'd come home to run their valve program.

I turned thirty on the ninth of January. On the twelfth, in a probate office in Bramport, Beatrix filed the sealed claim.

Agathe cried at the airport. She held each twin until they squirmed and told them in Swiss German to be good, and Pippa told her, "Actually, I'm always good." Felix pressed his blue stethoscope to Agathe's coat and listened for a long time, and then he patted the place, twice, and didn't say anything at all.

---

On Saturday the fourteenth of March 2026, our plane came down through thick cloud over Boston, and the whole cabin shook.

Felix gripped my sleeve with both hands. He was four and a half and small for it, and he hated noise and bumping more than anything in the world. His face was the color of the tray table.

So I did what Helen used to do for me. I put my mouth close to his ear.

"Why won't lobsters share? Because they're shellfish."

He didn't laugh. He never laughed at it. He just listened, and held on.

I told it again, and again, under my breath, counting on my fingers against his back where he could feel it. The plane dropped and shuddered. I told it eleven times. That's the number. I don't know why. That's how many times you tell it when someone's scared.

On the eleventh, the wheels hit the runway.

At arrivals, Pippa marched ahead of me with Admiral, her gray stuffed shark, held over her head like a trophy. Felix walked holding a fistful of my coat. The terminal smelled of coffee and floor wax and other people's homecomings.

There was a newsstand by the exit. I saw it from twenty feet away and kept walking, and then I couldn't.

A business magazine, glossy, the cover a single face. Black hair, a dark suit, the harbor cranes behind him blurred to rust. Green eyes looking straight into the camera, unimpressed by the question.

CALLOWAY'S HARBOR, it said across the top. How Rhys Calloway Built an Empire on the Water.

I hadn't seen his face in five years. It was harder. That was all I had time to think.

Pippa had stopped in front of the rack. She held Admiral up to the cover, nose to nose, and waved him back and forth.

"Admiral says hello, grumpy man."

Felix let go of my coat. He went and stood close beside his sister and looked up at the cover, and then at her face, and then back at the cover. Then he put his mouth to her ear.

"That man has your eyes," Felix whispered to Pippa.