The fluorescents in the surgical wing stayed on all night. Around four in the morning the surgeon came out into the hallway and pulled his mask down.
He's stable. The damage is significant.
Vivienne went straight down on the linoleum the way her son had gone down two hours earlier. She crawled forward on her knees and got her arms around my shins.
Iris. Iris. Beg him to fight. Beg him to stay. He listens to you. He only listens to you anymore.
I looked down at her.
In life two, the morning after she pushed me down the staircase, she had stood in the hospital corridor with this same posture in reverse — looking down on me lying in a transport chair, dry-eyed.
One miscarriage, Iris. The Hales will manage.
I drew my legs back from her hands.
I'm not a cure.
She broke open across the floor.
Lachlan stepped past her and set his peacoat across my shoulders. His voice was quiet. Let's go.
Down the corridor, in the family lounge by the window, Wren was sitting up with Steggy and a Hale General Pediatrics blanket someone had given him. He saw me and ran the length of the hallway in his socks.
Mommy. Are we going home.
I crouched down to his height and pulled him in.
Yes, baby.
Lachlan stood at a distance, not pushing.
When I stood back up he matched my pace down the hallway. I half thought you'd waver.
I looked at the surgical wing doors that had closed behind us.
I wavered for two lifetimes.
This one wasn't theirs anymore.
Tatum's case moved fast.
Forged paternity report, conspiracy to commit kidnapping of a minor, attempted assault with a deadly weapon — the AUSA stacked them up clean. She was looking at twelve to fifteen before a deal.
In the courtroom, on the morning she was led out in cuffs, she turned her head toward where I was sitting.
Iris. The voice came out flat and dry, like a piece of paper sliding across a desk. You think Lachlan Quinn loves you. He had a team on you for five years. He has every address you've ever slept at. You just got traded from the Hales to the Quinns.
The line hit clean. It went in under the rib.
That night, back at the Quinn house in Back Bay, I started packing.
Lachlan stood in the bedroom doorway with his shoulder against the frame and watched. His face was bad.
Running again.
I folded one of Wren's small flannel shirts into the case.
Lachlan. I'm not anyone's prize.
He was quiet a long time.
Then he came into the room and set three things down on the dresser, one at a time.
A keyring with two keys on it. Wren and Thorn. The freehold. I bought the building from your landlord eight months ago. The deed transferred to you this morning.
A blue folder. Custody agreement, signed by me, filed in Maine. You are sole primary. I'm not contesting. The visitation language is whatever you write into it.
A bank card. Education trust. Started the year I figured out he existed. The number is enough for him to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life, including nothing.
I looked at the small stack on the dresser. What does this mean.
His eyes came up. For the first time since I had met him on a barroom floor he wasn't looking at me with the angle of a man taking inventory.
It means you can leave. And I won't follow.
I didn't speak.
He laughed once, low at himself. Iris, I'm a bad-name guy. I don't do anything clean. But I wasn't going to keep you the way the Hales kept you. I wanted to be sure you knew that.
Wren stuck his head around the doorway.
Mr. Quinn. Aren't you coming?
Lachlan softened — visibly, in a way I hadn't seen — and crouched to fix the collar of Wren's pajama top, which had folded under itself.
Depends on your mom, kid.
Wren considered. Then you have to get in line.
Where am I in line.
Wren counted off on his fingers, with the seriousness he brought to all serious things.
Mommy's number one. The flower shop's number two. Steggy's number three. You're number four.
Lachlan glanced up at me. The thing behind his eyes was lit and quiet.
Four works.
I went back to Wren Harbor.
Lachlan didn't follow.
A single white garden rose arrived at the shop on the second morning, wrapped in plain kraft paper with a card. The card had nothing on it but the date in pencil.
Day 1.
The next day: Day 2.
Then Day 5. Day 12. Day 30.
He had picked the laziest, most patient way of saying I am still here that I had ever encountered. One stem at a time. No note. No bouquet. No call.
Wren picked one up off the counter one morning and looked at it suspiciously.
Mommy. Is Mr. Quinn rich.
Yes, baby.
Then why does he just send one. He could send a big basket.
I clipped a dead leaf off the stem.
Because he's learning to keep his hands to himself.
Wren said, Oh, with the considered politeness of a five-year-old who didn't understand a sentence but had decided to be respectful, and went back to his stegosaurs.
On Day 46, Sterling came.
He came in a wheelchair pushed by Vivienne, both of them in dark wool against the harbor wind. He had lost more weight. His skin had gone the color of the wet brick of the storefront. Vivienne stopped the chair fifteen feet short of the door — neither of them came in.
I went out, the brass bell knocking against the wood.
Vivienne didn't lift her head. Iris. We're not going to bother you.
Sterling lifted a leather portfolio from his lap. Oxblood, monogrammed CSH in small gold capitals.
This is my eleven percent of Hale General, in trust to be transferred. And the deed to Brimmer Street. The papers are signed already. They take effect when you take the folder.
I didn't reach for it.
It's not compensation, he said. It's debt service.
I looked at him.
You can't pay this debt.
He nodded. I know.
The harbor wind moved through the open door. The brass bell made a small dry sound.
He turned his head one degree toward the inside of the shop, where Wren was at the front counter with a coloring book, head bent, working hard on a stegosaurus the color of orange juice. Sterling's face went somewhere private for half a second, and he pulled his eyes back to the empty middle distance.
I'm not going to come again.
Vivienne made a small noise behind him she could not quite hold.
Sterling set the portfolio down on the wrought-iron café table outside the shop and turned the chair toward the curb. Vivienne began pushing it back toward the rental car.
Two steps from the chair Sterling stopped her.
He didn't turn his head.
Iris.
A beat. He spoke into the air in front of him, not toward me at all.
The scarlet. It suited you.
I didn't answer.
He didn't look back.
That was the last I saw of any of them.
On Day 100, Lachlan came to Wren Harbor.
No driver. No SUV. No men in coats at the curb. He arrived on foot up the brick of Main Street in jeans and a wool sweater that had pilled at the elbows, pulling a single black wheeled suitcase behind him, and stopped outside Wren and Thorn looking like a large piece of expensive equipment that had been returned to the wrong address.
I was wrapping an arrangement for a walk-in.
He came in and didn't try to talk. He went to the cutting bench, picked up the shears like a man defusing a small bomb, and took the heads off three perfectly good Juliet roses before the customer turned around.
She laughed. Oh — new hire?
He answered her without looking up from his hands. Trial period.
When Wren came in from kindergarten at three forty-five he saw Lachlan and dropped his backpack on the floor and went up onto his toes.
Mr. Quinn. What number are you.
Lachlan picked him up like he weighed nothing.
Still four.
Wren considered. He patted Lachlan twice on the shoulder. Keep at it.
That night, after I closed, I pushed the day's ledger across the counter to him.
The new hire owes me thirty-six dollars in dead inventory.
He reached for his phone to Venmo me.
I put my hand on his.
Take it out of his paycheck.
His eyes came up.
The look in them — the one I had seen at the airport, the one I had seen in the bedroom doorway with the keys and the folder — had gone clean. Quiet. The hunting was over.
There's a paycheck?
I closed the ledger.
Dinner.
He laughed, almost soundless.
He stayed in Wren Harbor for a long time. He rented a clapboard half a mile from the shop. He drove Wren to kindergarten in the mornings in a beat-up secondhand Subaru he bought at a dealership outside Camden. He stood at the cutting bench in the afternoons and learned by trial and error which white blooms were garden roses and which were peonies. He learned not to ask questions when I went quiet.
There was a wet night in October when I locked up at eight.
He was standing on the bricks outside the shop holding a black umbrella tilted entirely toward where I'd come out, his right shoulder soaked through to the wool sweater under the peacoat.
I stopped.
In two lives, I had stood in rain waiting for Sterling Hale a number of times I had stopped counting.
This was the first time someone had stood in rain waiting for me to come home.
I took the umbrella handle from him.
Lachlan.
Yes.
I said, You're hired.
His fingers went tight around the handle of the umbrella in mine. The color came up under his eyes in a way he didn't try to manage.
The shop door was still cracked open. Wren stuck his head out.
Then what number is he, Mommy.
I took Lachlan's free hand.
Three.
Wren frowned. What about Steggy.
Lachlan crouched down, soaking the knee of his jeans against the wet brick, and lifted Wren up against his hip.
Steggy's working overtime tonight. He's temporarily ceding his spot.
The rain came down hard on the harbor.
The lights were on inside the shop.
I didn't look back anymore.