I woke into too much light. White sheets, a Back Bay penthouse view past floor-to-ceiling glass — Commonwealth Ave going east, the river beyond. Every muscle in my body felt as though it had been wrung out and hung up to dry.
Lachlan was propped against the headboard with two shirt buttons undone, a long red scratch on his collarbone that I was not going to claim.
He handed me a glass of water.
Ms. Marlowe. Don't tell me you don't remember.
My hand stopped halfway to the glass. The fragments came back fast enough to scald the back of my neck.
I tried to get out of the bed and found a stack of new clothes folded on the chair, tags off. My size. A J. Crew sweater, dark wash jeans, plain underwear, plain socks. No labels I could trace.
He read my face. I didn't have you investigated. The hotel has a personal-shopping concierge.
I dressed. He had breakfast waiting in the next room — eggs, coffee, a pot of yogurt — and my phone face-up on the table with sixty-three missed calls.
Sterling. Vivienne. Tatum.
A text bubbled up while I was looking at the screen.
Sterling: Iris. Tell me you weren't with Quinn last night.
Then immediately after:
Sterling: He's not a good man. Don't use yourself to hurt me.
I set the phone down and laughed. Not on purpose.
Lachlan slid the plate of eggs across the marble. Ex?
Mm.
He took my phone before I could stop him, thumbed twice, and put it to his ear.
Sterling picked up on the second ring with my name in his mouth like a charge.
Iris. Where are you.
Lachlan, in the slowest voice I've ever heard a man use:
In my bed.
The line went so quiet I could hear the HVAC.
I choked on coffee.
Sterling's voice came back colder than I'd ever heard him.
Quinn. Put her on.
Lachlan looked across the table at me, mouth pulling sideways.
She's tired.
He hung up.
I grabbed the phone back. You did that on purpose.
He didn't bother denying it. He's uncomfortable. I'm comfortable. The math works.
I sat there looking at the line of his jaw and the considered, useful slouch of his shoulders, and I had the thought I should have had ten hours earlier:
This man is more dangerous than Sterling.
So thirty minutes later, while he was on a call to Singapore in the next room, I picked up my suitcase and walked out the lobby's side entrance and took an Uber to South Station and got on the next train going anywhere north.
I got off in Wren Harbor, Maine.
It is a postcard the way the worst parts of New England are postcards — a working harbor under two miles of fog half the year, a single main street paved in brick, a hardware store that has been there since the Depression. Not on Google's first page. Two hours up the coast from Portland by the kind of car-and-ferry route that no one with a stylist would ever drive themselves.
I rented a clapboard storefront with an apartment above it and opened a flower shop. Wren & Thorn. The lease was in my maiden name. I painted the door dark green myself.
In the second month I caught a stomach bug that wouldn't leave.
I bought a First Response at the CVS on Route 1 and took it home and sat on the bathroom floor of the upstairs apartment with my back against the clawfoot tub and watched two pink lines come up in two seconds flat.
The first thing I felt was not fear.
It was ridiculous.
In life one I never got pregnant. In life two I made it to twenty weeks and Vivienne pushed me off the second-to-last step of the Brimmer Street staircase in slippers, on purpose, with the housekeeper watching. The baby didn't make it past that afternoon. I had spent two lifetimes wanting to bear Sterling Hale a child.
Now I didn't want to be tethered to anyone, and I was.
The OB in Portland asked me, kindly, Are you keeping it?
I put my hand flat over my stomach and said, Let me think about it.
I thought about it for three days.
On the fourth day Sterling found Wren Harbor.
He came in the door of the shop in a Barbour Beaufort jacket black with rain, the waxed cotton creaking when he moved, looking like a man who had been dropped from one weather system into another. The brass bell on the leather strap above the door rang and didn't stop ringing for a second after he was inside.
My hand stopped on the latch.
Iris. Come home.
I didn't answer.
His eyes went past me to the counter, where the CVS-brand prenatal multivitamins sat next to the register with the label out. He went white in a way you couldn't fake.
You're pregnant.
I picked up the bottle and put it into the drawer.
Not your business.
He crossed the floor in two steps and got his hand around my wrist.
Is it Quinn's.
The grip was tight enough to bruise. I made a small sound of pain before I could stop myself.
He let go like he'd burned himself.
God. I'm sorry.
That word. Sorry.
I'd waited two lifetimes to hear him say it.
Hearing it, I was bored.
He didn't look away. The rain was running off his hair, off the line of his jaw, onto the wide-plank floor. Iris, you can't keep it. Quinn won't let you go. He came at you because of me, do you understand? You were a way to hurt me.
I slapped him.
Open hand, hard enough that my palm rang.
Sterling. You don't get to decide about my child.
He held his cheek and didn't speak for a long count. The rain made a soft running sound on the slates outside.
When he found his voice it was almost a whisper.
Because I know what it's like when there isn't one.
The cold went straight through my ribs.
He remembered the baby from life two. The staircase. The blood.
He had remembered all of it.
After Sterling left, I kept the baby.
I put Lachlan's last name on the birth certificate because I chose to, not because anyone asked me to. Wren Quinn. Born in a Maine snowstorm at two in the morning at Pen Bay Medical, weighing six pounds eleven. The nurse handed me a small red-faced creature with both fists clenched and a furious set to his mouth, and the lives I had spent in cold Hale corridors — the chartered psych ward, the rain on the South End curb, Vivienne's housekeeper folding the bloody linens — went a long way away.
Quiet held for five years.
The shop did all right. Locals brought their dogs in. I learned to do funeral arrangements without crying anymore. Wren grew into a serious boy with thick black hair and his father's straight stare, and a passionate attachment to a purple plush stegosaurus he called Steggy.
The week he turned five, somebody put a brick through my storefront window.
I came down the stairs at six in the morning to glass on the floor and the words sprayed across the brick exterior in red Krylon.
GIVE THE BOY BACK, BITCH.
The red almost matched the dress from the rooftop, in reverse — anger painted on me from the outside instead of worn out of me on purpose.
Wren came down behind me in his pajamas with Steggy under his arm.
Mommy. He looked at it with his serious face. What does it say.
I shifted to block his view. Nothing important. Bad word. Don't read it.
He didn't cry. He was very pale.
The Wren Harbor police took a report. The shop's outdoor camera wire had been cut sometime in the night. The neighbor at the chowder house across the street told me, voice low, that there had been a black Suburban with Massachusetts plates parked at the corner for three days.
I assumed Sterling.
That night a call came in from a number I didn't know. I picked up because the cell signal in Wren Harbor is bad enough that you take every call.
Tatum.
Iris, sweetie. Five years. Are you happy out there?
I held the phone harder.
She laughed, the air-light laugh from the rooftop. Your little boy looks just like Lachlan Quinn.
What do you want.
Nothing, she said. Sterling's dying, Iris. Pancreatic. Stage four. The Hales need an heir. If you don't come home with him, I'll come up there and collect him myself.
I hung up and booked the first flight south out of Portland the next morning.
Not for Sterling.
If Tatum had found Wren Harbor, she had also found Wren's preschool, his pediatrician at Pen Bay, the after-school sitter, the address of every soft spot in our quiet little arrangement.
I needed to put her down where she stood.
The flight landed at Logan late afternoon. I had Wren by the hand and Steggy under his other arm and we hadn't cleared baggage claim before a row of men in dark coats stepped into our line.
The man in front wore a tailored navy peacoat. Sharp cheekbones. The kind of stillness you can only afford if you don't actually need to move.
Lachlan Quinn.
He looked at the boy at my side. Whatever he saw there settled behind his eyes and stopped moving.
Iris Marlowe.
He stepped close enough to set his hand at the small of my back and pull me half against him.
Hey, sweetheart. You played me and ran.
Before I could speak Wren stepped between us.
A small body, square in front of me, his face tipped up at Lachlan, both fists clenched on Steggy.
You don't get to touch my mom.
Lachlan looked down.
Same eyes. Same jaw, the kind of unbroken straight line that the Globe's photographer used to catch in profile in his quarterly profile shots. A mold and a casting.
Lachlan's mouth pulled into something I almost couldn't read. The cold that came up behind it made my shoulder blades pull together.
How old.
Wren held his ground. Five.
Lachlan's eyes came up to mine. You hid him well.
I took Wren's hand and put him behind my hip. Mr. Quinn. There's nothing to discuss between us.
Nothing. He stepped closer, his voice down a register. You ran for five years with my kid in your suitcase. Tell me again what's nothing.
A traveler with a rolling bag drifted to a stop ten feet off, watching.
I made my voice even. Mind your language.
He straightened, looked over my shoulder, and went still.
I turned.
Sterling stood in the middle of the baggage hall.
He had lost so much weight that the black coat hung off him like the hanger had been left in. His face was the color of old paper. He had the careful gait of someone whose body had become a logistics problem he managed in small intervals between rest.
He saw the boy and locked.
Tatum was at his elbow, the long white wool coat, the hand laid lightly along his forearm with the air of someone who had earned it. When her eyes met mine she did the cousin-of-the-bride concern again, this time with a layer of grief over it.
Iris. Sterling only wanted to see you one last time. Did you really have to bring Quinn's men in here to wave at him.
I laughed.
Five years and she still hadn't found a second move.
Sterling took her hand off his arm.
He came across the polished floor a step at a time, eyes on me, eyes on Wren, eyes back on me. When he stopped two feet away his voice came out hoarse.
You'd rather have his child than look at me one more time.
Wren's small fingers tightened around mine. Mommy. Who is he.
I kept my voice level. Nobody important, baby.
Sterling's eyes went red instantly.
Tatum's face changed. She pressed a hand to her chest and started to fold sideways into him, the practiced faint.
Sterling. I don't feel well.
In the second life he would have caught her. He would have caught her in life one, too, before she'd ever been anyone he should have caught.
He didn't move.
She went down on the polished floor in her white coat at the feet of three porters and a TSA officer, splayed and ridiculous, like a joke someone had set up and forgotten to deliver.