Chapter 7 Three Hundred Days

Rhys

"Four and a half," the little girl had said, before her mother could open her mouth. "Almost five."

At ten past three Rhys heard it again, standing at his kitchen window on Lantern Row in the dark.

The magnolia in the garden was a black shape against the streetlight. The house ticked and settled around him. He had a glass of water in his hand that he'd poured an hour ago and not drunk. He hadn't been able to lie down.

Every time he closed his eyes he saw a pair of green eyes looking up at him from the height of his belt, narrowed, measuring, as if he were a problem she'd been set at school.

Almost five.

He'd said nothing after that. Margot had said, in that low flat voice she used now, "Dora, take them down to the cafeteria, please." The old woman had herded them out. The girl had gone backwards, still staring at him, the stuffed shark held up under her chin.

The boy had gone the other way first. He'd slipped around behind his mother and pressed himself against the backs of her legs, one small fist knotted in her white coat, and looked out at Rhys from behind her knee.

Then Dora had taken his hand and he'd gone too.

Rhys drank the water. It tasted of nothing.

---

At seven he was at his desk with a legal pad, because that was how he thought.

He wrote it at the top. Four and a half.

Four and a half meant born in the autumn of 2021. Count back nine months from autumn 2021 and you landed in the middle of the winter. January. February.

They'd still been married in February. He remembered February. A snowstorm that shut the city for two days, the roads closed, the office closed.

Turning from the coffee machine at midday to find her in the kitchen doorway with snow in her hair and her coat soaked through, back from the hospital hours early. Handing her a towel. Looking at her, really looking, for maybe the first time in a year, and not being able to stop.

He put the pen down.

His finger had been bare for five years. He'd taken the band off on the morning he found her signature on Carrow's papers and her own ring lying on the last page.

Owen came in at half past seven with paper. Of course he did.

"Kantonsklinik Zürichberg," Owen said, and laid a printout on the desk. "Department of cardiac surgery, staff page."

There was a photograph. Margot in a white coat with her arms folded, unsmiling, looking at the camera as if it had made a mistake and she was waiting for it to notice. Underneath, in German and then in English: Dr. M. Fairley, Consultant Cardiac Surgeon. Dr. Fairley developed the Fairley leaflet reconstruction. She lives in Zurich and is the mother of two.

"Mother of two," said Rhys.

"There's this as well." Owen laid a second sheet beside the first. A scan of a page from a hospital newsletter, in German. A photograph, slightly blurred, of a small dark-haired woman on the hospital steps pushing a double pram. Two tiny bundles in it, hats pulled down. Under the picture a caption, and a date: Oktober 2021.

"Where did you get this?"

"Their archive's online. I searched her name." Owen straightened the sheet so its edge lined up with the first one. "I've saved copies. I keep copies."

"I know you do."

"October 2021," Owen said, without inflection. "Two of them."

Rhys read the date four times. It didn't change.

Then he looked at the small figure behind the pram. He'd been married to her for three years and he wasn't sure he'd ever seen her look as tired as that. Or as alone.

"Thank you, Owen."

Owen didn't leave. He rarely did, when it mattered.

"The boy," Owen said. "Was hiding."

"I noticed."

"I thought you'd want to know that I noticed too."

---

He drove out to Larkmoor at noon.

He told himself it was to check on the care suite, on Ursula, on the rails they were fitting in the bathroom. That was a lie. He wanted to be told something, and Delphine was the person who'd always told him things.

He went to the care suite first.

It had been the morning room once, where his grandmother had written her letters. Now it held a hospital bed with rails, a hoist, an oxygen concentrator humming in the corner, and the smell that every sickroom has under the flowers. Edmund's chessboard sat on a side table by the window with the pieces set out for a game nobody played.

Ursula Blythe was folding towels. She straightened when he came in.

"He's sleeping, Mr. Calloway. He had a difficult night."

"I won't wake him."

He stood at the end of the bed. His grandfather lay on his back with his mouth a little open, his right hand curled on the blanket, his breathing slow.

Five years ago this man had walked the length of the container quay every Sunday morning in all weathers, telling Rhys the names of ships. Now he slept most of the day. The doctors said it was the stroke. The doctors said it was his age.

Rhys bent close to the pillow.

"She has children," he said, low. "Margot. A boy and a girl."

Edmund's eyes opened.

They were heavy, the lids half down, the whites yellowish. But they found Rhys's face and fixed on it, and the left hand shot out and caught his sleeve with more strength than Rhys would have thought it had. A sound came out of him. Not the broken moan from the consult room. Something shorter, urgent, pushed up again and again against a door that wouldn't open.

"Mr. Calloway, please." Ursula was beside him. "You'll upset him, and then he won't settle at all, and I'll have to give him something extra." She was already detaching Edmund's fingers from his sleeve, gently, one at a time. "He doesn't understand, you know. Not really. It only frightens him."

Rhys looked at the hand on his sleeve. Then at his grandfather's eyes, which were not frightened. Which were furious.

"Rest, Grandfather," he said, and stepped back, and the hand fell to the blanket.

Ursula was writing in her little notebook when he left.

Delphine was on the terrace in a long gray coat, drinking tea from a cup with gold leaves around the rim. The lawn sloped away below her to the bare trees and the greenhouse roof, fogged white on the inside. Her silver hair didn't move in the wind.

"Sweetheart," she said. "I heard about yesterday."

"From Ursula."

"Ursula was terribly upset. Edmund was agitated all night. He kept making that sound." She set the cup in its saucer. "And the new surgeon is Margot. Of all people. I thought she'd vanished off the face of the earth."

"Zurich," said Rhys.

"Zurich." Delphine shook her head. "Well. She always was ambitious."

He leaned on the stone balustrade. Below, a gardener was wheeling a barrow of mulch toward the greenhouse. He hadn't meant to say it. It came out anyway.

"She has children. Twins. A boy and a girl."

There was a silence behind him.

He turned. Delphine had gone pale, all at once. Her hand was still on the saucer. The cup rattled faintly on the china, and she took her hand away and folded it in her lap with the other one.

"Children," she said.

"Four and a half. Born October 2021."

He watched her do the same arithmetic he'd done in the dark kitchen. He watched her get the same answer.

"Oh, sweetheart." Her voice was soft again, but slower than usual, each word picked up and checked before she set it down.

"Are you sure they're yours? I don't mean to be cruel. But she left in such a hurry. And she was so desperate, that last year. You didn't see her much. Anyone could have—" She stopped herself. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. It's a shock."

"The girl has my eyes."

"Lots of children have green eyes."

"Not like that."

Delphine didn't answer. A gull went over, complaining. Then she picked up her cup again, and this time her hand was perfectly firm.

"Then you'll need to be certain," she said. "Won't you? For everyone's sake. For Edmund's sake. You can't take that woman's word for anything, Rhys. Not after what she did."

He turned back to the greenhouse. Through the fogged glass he could just make out rows of tall green stalks, staked and tied, not yet in flower.

"No," he said. "I can't."

---

Benedict Carrow came to the tower at four. He'd been the Calloway family lawyer for twenty-five years, and he looked like a ledger that had learned to walk: narrow, dry, every line of him ruled straight. He sat across the desk with Owen's two printouts and a fountain pen and listened without interrupting, which Rhys had always respected.

"The divorce became absolute on the twenty-third of September 2021," Carrow said, when he'd finished. "The children were born on, I assume, a date in October."

"Owen?"

"Second of October," said Owen, from the corner. "The clinic newsletter lists staff births. I kept that page too."

"Nine days," said Carrow. "Well within three hundred." He uncapped his pen. "In this Commonwealth, a child born to a woman within three hundred days of the end of her marriage is presumed to be her husband's. The presumption is yours, Rhys. You don't have to prove anything to begin."

"Go on."

"You file a petition to establish paternity. You ask for custody, or a share of it. You ask the court to order genetic testing, which it will, and she'll comply, because if she doesn't the presumption simply stands and she looks like a woman with something to hide."

"And if she fights it?"

"She can fight it." Carrow wrote something in his small, square hand. "She'll lose. The court will order the swabs. The swabs will say what the presumption already says, if you're right." He looked up. "She can't hide them from the presumption, Rhys. She can only make it ugly."

"How long?"

"Service within the week. A first hearing in three or four." Carrow capped the pen and uncapped it again, which was as close as he came to fidgeting. "In the meantime you may ask her for contact. She may say no. I'd advise you not to turn up on her doorstep."

Rhys stood up and went to the window.

The cranes were still working. The light was going, the water turning from gray to lead, the first lamps coming on along the quay. Somewhere across the harbor, probably in her mother's narrow house in Old Harbor, a little girl with his eyes was eating dinner. A little boy was holding a toy stethoscope.

He thought about the boy behind his mother's legs, the small fist in her coat. The way he'd looked out at Rhys around her knee, as if Rhys were the thing in the dark at the top of the stairs.

He put the thought away. He was good at putting things away.

You can't take that woman's word for anything, Delphine had said.

She'd known. For five years she'd known, and she'd raised his children in another country, and she'd never sent him a single line. She'd decided he shouldn't know. She'd decided for him. Everyone always decided for him.

Not this time.

Behind him Carrow was squaring the printouts into a folder. Rhys turned in time to see the newsletter page go in on top: the steps, the double pram, the small tired woman pushing it uphill alone.

"Not that one," he said.

Carrow paused. "It establishes the date."

"Owen's staff page establishes the date." Rhys reached across the desk and slid the newsletter out of the folder. He didn't look at it again. He folded it once and put it in his inside pocket.

Carrow looked at him over the top of his glasses and said nothing. Owen, in the corner, said nothing either, which from Owen was a great deal.

"File it," Rhys said. "Paternity, custody, DNA. Today."