Chapter 11 — GERALD'S FILE

Two weeks later Emmett Cole came to Bell Street.

He had never been to the apartment. I had never given him the address.

He stood in the stairwell — you come up an outside iron staircase at the back of the hardware store — with a cardboard box under one arm and snow on his shoulders, and he said, "I should have called first."

"You don't have my number."

"No."

I let him in and he stood in the middle of the room, which takes about four steps to cross, and looked at the cot and the radiator and the hot plate and did not say anything about any of it, which I appreciated more than I can explain.

He had brought a box.

"These were in the quarters," he said. "Over the garage. She had the locks changed on the main house on the sixteenth but nobody remembered the garage until last Tuesday, and I went and got my things."

"Emmett, are these yours or hers?"

"Mine." He put the box on the table. "Everything in there is mine. I want to say that first, because I know what this looks like."

Inside were three things.

A photograph album with a green cover, the cheap kind you get in a drugstore.

A brown envelope, unopened, with Elise written on the front in Adam's handwriting.

And a set of car keys on a leather fob for a vehicle that had not existed in twenty years.

I picked up the envelope first, obviously.

"Where did you get this?"

"His car."

"Adam's car was destroyed."

"Not that car. The Volvo. The one before, that he kept at the house and drove maybe four times a year." Emmett sat down without being asked, which he had never once done in my presence. "It was in the glovebox. It's been there since March."

"March. He died in May."

"Yes."

"You've had a letter addressed to me since May."

"Since the twenty-ninth of October," he said. "Which is the day I went to get my belongings out of a car I was told I could keep and found it in the glovebox."

I want to be fair to him and I want to be honest about myself.

I was angry.

I said something to Emmett Cole that afternoon that I have apologised for twice and that he has waved off twice, and what I said was: "Everyone in that family has been holding things back from me for two years and now you're doing it too."

He took it.

Then he said, "You had a four-pound baby in a NICU. I wasn't going to hand you that in a hospital corridor."

I opened the album instead of the envelope, because I was not ready.

It is photographs of one boy, from about four years old to about nineteen.

Adam on a bicycle. Adam in a school blazer with the tie pulled sideways. Adam at maybe eight in a swimming pool in the summer, holding onto the edge, laughing at whoever is holding the camera.

Adam at fifteen washing a car in that gravel drive with his sleeves rolled up.

Forty-one photographs and Adam is in every single one and there is not one photograph of Margot or Gerald anywhere in the book.

"Who took these?"

Emmett Cole put both hands flat on his knees.

"I did," he said.