Chapter 2

I did not sleep. I built a request instead.

By six I had a signed patient-records authorization in front of me - mine, and Miles's as his mother. By seven I had it emailed to St. Auren's Health Information Management with a firm cover sheet, because I have learned that institutions move differently when a partner's name is on the fax header.

Then I did what I always do with a problem that frightens me. I went to work and pretended it was Thursday.

At noon the hospital called to say the obstetrics delivery summaries for that year were stored off-site and would take five to seven business days. The woman was pleasant and immovable. I have cross-examined pleasant and immovable before. I thanked her and started around her.

At four, Grant came through the office to drop off a brief I'd left at home. He kissed my temple, and I smelled his cologne, the same one for sixteen years.

"Long day?" he said.

"Miles volunteered last night," I said. "At the warming center. There was a boy there."

"Mm." He was already looking at his phone.

"Grant. There was a boy there who looked exactly like Miles."

He looked up then. Not sharply. That was the thing. He looked up the way a man looks up when a bus backfires - a flicker, a settling, and then a calm that was a half-beat too slow.

"Kids look alike," he said. "Cousins, strangers. You'd be surprised."

"He had an anklet around his neck. Same kind as the one in my box. It said Ellery."

The phone went dark in his hand. He smiled at me - genuinely, I think - and said, "Honey, you've been carrying that loss for fourteen years. Sometimes the mind wants to put a face on it." He rubbed my shoulder. "Come home tonight. I'll cook."

I said I would. Then I drove to the Loop.

The warming center opened at six. Eli came in at seven-twenty, hood up, coatless, snow in his hair. He saw me and stopped in the doorway the way an animal stops when it hears a sound it can't place. I stayed seated. I did not stand, because standing would have made me a threat, and I had spent the day deciding that I could not afford to be one.

"Mr. Pruitt," I said.

"I'm not a Mister." He sat across from me, one folding chair between us, as if he'd measured the distance.

"I want to show you something." I laid the cedar box on the table and opened it. The bright anklet lay on its tissue. He looked at it for a long time. Then he pulled his cord over his head again and set the tarnished band beside the bright one, the way you'd set down two cards in a game.

ELLERY. December eighth. His number was 4413. Mine - Miles's - was 4412.

Consecutive.

I took a photograph. Then I asked if I could take one of him holding both, and he said no, and I put the phone away.

"Where did you get yours?" I asked.

"I was born with it."

"I know. I mean who-"

"I don't know." He shrugged, but his eyes never left the two bands. "I was little. It was always on the cord. My aunt said it came with me."

"Your aunt."

"Then the state took me." He said it the way a man reports weather. "Six years old."

I sat with my hands folded and did not let myself reach for him, and in that hour I learned he had slept in three shelters, two train stations and a McDonald's on State Street this winter, and that he was fourteen, and that he was not going to ask me for anything.

That night I matched the numbers a dozen times, and at 11:40 the hospital's records supervisor called back early and read me a line off the delivery summary, apologetic, thinking it was a simple correction.

"Live births: two."

"Say that again."

"Live births - two. December eighth. There is a separate stillbirth certificate in the file for the same date." A pause. "That must be a filing error. It happens."

"Who signed it?"

She read the name off the death record the way you read off a license plate. "Edwin Cole, M.D. Disposition: private interment."

Private. No plot number. No funeral home I'd ever heard of. No headstone I had ever stood in front of, in fourteen years, because Grant had told me it was better not to, and I had let him decide.

I hung up and sat in the dark kitchen of my warm, silent, well-appointed home and understood that I had been grieving a filing error for fourteen years, and that someone in my own house had been reading the file.