Chapter 12 — THE DRIVER'S QUARTERS

He told it plainly and it took about twenty minutes and he did not once make himself the hero of it, which is how I know it was true.

He came to Wren House in 1999.

He was thirty-one, he had been driving for a livery company in Stamford, and Gerald Halloway hired him for a two-year contract to drive and keep the cars.

Margot was thirty and had been married for four years and had no children.

I am going to skip the part where he explains how it started, because he skipped it too, and because it is not mine.

It lasted fourteen months.

Adam was born in 2000.

"Did Gerald know?"

"Not then."

"Did she tell you?"

"No." He looked at the wall. "She told me it wasn't. Twice. Once when she was pregnant and once when he was about two, in the kitchen, out of nowhere, when nobody had asked her anything."

"Then how did you know?"

"I didn't. For years." He turned the keys over in his hand. "Mrs. Thorne, I want you to understand that I did not spend twenty-six years there because I was certain. I spent twenty-six years there because I was not certain."

He stayed.

He was offered two other jobs and he did not take them.

When Adam was six he taught him to ride a bicycle in that gravel drive, because Gerald was in Hartford and Margot did not go outside in the summer.

When Adam was eleven he drove him to school every morning for four years.

When Adam was nineteen and crashed a car into the gatepost at two in the morning, Emmett got there first, put him in the passenger seat, drove the car into the garage, and told Gerald in the morning that he had done it himself reversing.

"He believed you?"

"He paid for the gatepost."

When Adam got married, Emmett stood at the back of the photographs in the row where staff stood, and Margot Halloway arranged it that way, and Adam did not know why it made him angry but it made him angry, and he had a row about it with his mother on his own wedding day that I never understood until that afternoon in a room on Bell Street.

"Did he ever find out?"

Emmett did not answer for a long moment.

Then he nodded at the envelope on the table.

"I think that's what that is."