Chapter 4

The banquet company ran out of the hotel on Grand Street, and it took Claire two phone calls and a lie about a lost earring to get the name of the temp they had hired for the gala. Ellis Vance. No address but a river-side one, c/o Vance.

She did not go to the house. She went where a seventeen-year-old who needed money would be at six in the morning, and found him at a fish house on the water side of the bridge, hosing down the concrete with his sleeves rolled. The bracelet rode his wrist above the water.

He saw her and did not stop working.

"You're the lady from the dinner," he said.

"I'm Claire."

"I know who you are." He aimed the hose at a corner, at blood and scales and crushed ice. "You looked me up."

"I looked up the boy who showed me a bracelet with my family's name on it."

Ellis shut off the water. He wrung out his forearms and looked at her the way a dog looks at a hand it hasn't decided about. Up close he was all Grady's bones with none of Grady's padding - the same jaw, the same eyes, worn thin and hard by seventeen years of a life she had paid strangers to keep quiet about.

"The stamp says TWIN B," he said. "I did the math a long time ago. There was an A. Faye kept a paper with your name and the hospital on it. When she got sick I started looking. Gala job was the closest I could get to you."

"You've been trying to reach me for months."

"I've been trying to see who you were." He coiled the hose. "Now I have. Nice dress."

She did not offer him money. She had rehearsed it on the drive and understood, standing in the cold and the fish smell, that it would have been the worst thing she could do.

"I have another son," she said. "His name is Grady. He has your face and your mark, and he does not know any of this, and I am going to have to tell him."

Ellis's jaw worked once. "That's your business."

"I want you to meet him."

"Why."

"Because you're both going to hear it eventually," Claire said, "and I would rather you heard it from each other than from a crowd."

He looked at her a long time. Then he said, "There's a diner on Mill Row. Six o'clock. I'm not promising I'll be friendly."

Grady got it out of her that night. He was too quick and too hurt not to - he had seen the bracelet, he had heard the words, and he had spent three days looking up a name on his phone. He stood in the kitchen with his coat still on and said, "You had a baby before me. A twin. And you never told me."

"Not before you. With you," Claire said. "The same night."

Something moved in his face then, something young and raw and awful to watch, and she understood that the truth, which she had spent three days thinking of as hers, belonged to him too, and he had not been given one minute to get used to it.

They went to Mill Row together. The diner had a cracked clock and coffee that had been on the burner too long. Ellis came in with his coat collar up, and Grady stood up when he saw him, and the two of them looked at each other across a laminate table and did not say anything for a while.

Then Grady reached out - not to shake hands, nothing that formal, just to see - and pushed the hair back off Ellis's right ear, and did not take his hand away.

"You have it," Grady said. His voice was not his own. "The mark."

Ellis did not flinch. "So do you."

Claire sat down because her knees had opinions. She watched her two sons study each other like men checking the same wound from different sides, and she thought: this is the most honest table I have ever sat at.

They got an hour. Grady asked questions in a rush and Ellis answered them flat and slow, and neither of them looked much at her, which she understood was its own kind of verdict.

When Grady got up, he said, "Everyone at school is going to ask what happened at the gala."

"Then we will decide together what to tell them," Claire said.

"I already decided." He put his jacket on. "I told Dad."

Claire's blood went thin and cold.

That night Whit came home late with the specific calm of a man who had been making calls, and when he set his briefcase down he said, "There's a boy claiming things. I've heard. I've handled it."