Chapter 1 — THE GIRL WITH THE ROSES

I was forty minutes early for a deposition, which is a thing I do on purpose because I would rather sit in a lobby than arrive anywhere at the same time as opposing counsel.

The Hyatt lobby is all glass on the river side and at ten in the morning in March the light comes off the water and up through that wall and turns the whole room white.

I was on a bench with my bag beside me and my phone face down on my knee.

There is a flower concession at the north end, a small cart with a striped awning, and it is one of the last of its kind in that part of the city.

The girl came across the marble with a wicker basket that was too big for her.

Seven, maybe eight.

Light brown hair pulled back, a blue cardigan with the sleeves slightly too long, a pale yellow dress with a round white collar of the kind children have not worn since about 1962.

She stopped in front of me at a polite distance and she said, "Would you like a rose, ma'am?"

I said, "Sure."

She took one out and held it up and I reached for it, and she watched my hand come toward her the way children watch things, completely and without any pretence of not looking.

She said, "Your ring looks just like my mom's."

I have a ring on my right hand.

Heavy gold, worked into the shape of a rose, with a deep red stone set down in the centre of the petals like something at the bottom of a well.

I have worn it every day since I was nineteen years old.

I said, "No, this ring belongs to my family."

I said it kindly.

I want to be precise about that, because I have gone over the sentence perhaps four hundred times since, and it was not unkind, and it was not sharp, and it was said in the voice of a woman being gentle with a child, and every single word in it was false.

She tipped her head.

And she said, "Does yours say Rosewood inside too?"

There is a thing that happens in the body before it happens in the mind.

My hearing went strange, as though the lobby had been moved a small distance away from me.

I looked at that child's face and I could feel the blood going out of my own.

Because there are four letters engraved on the inner band of that ring in a script so small you need a loupe, and the word is ROSEWOOD, and it is nine letters, and I have never in twenty-nine years shown the inside of that ring to another living person.

I heard myself say, "Where is your mother?"