Chapter 20 — HER NAME
Margot Halloway is in Niantic. She will be eligible in three years.
She has written to me twice.
The first letter was four pages and was about the house. I read it and did not reply.
The second was eleven lines and arrived on Wren's third birthday, which she got from somewhere, and it asked for a photograph.
I did not reply to that one either, and I want to explain why, because people have opinions.
It is not because I am owed something.
It is because she has never once, in a police interview, at a probate hearing, at a criminal trial, in a sentencing hearing, in two letters, or in a single word relayed through a lawyer, said the thing that she would have to say first.
Not sorry.
The other one.
She has never once acknowledged that there was a person in that hallway.
Her whole defence was about a floor, a shoe, a pill, a survey, a bloodline, a clause. Eleven months of extremely expensive argument, and not one sentence of it was about a woman with a suitcase in her hand.
She looked at an ultrasound photograph and said *that thing is not a Halloway.*
And she was, as it turns out, factually correct.
And it did not save her, because the man whose name was on the house had worked out thirty years earlier that a family is not a bloodline, and had written it down, and had numbered it eleven.
Wren is four and a half.
She has her father's hands and my terrible singing voice and a faint mark through her left eyebrow where the hair does not grow.
She has a trust that will pay for anything she ever wants to do, which she does not know about and will not know about until she is old enough to be bored by it.
She has a hundred and forty thousand dollars from a man who has never claimed her, in a document drawn in nine minutes.
She has a mother who teaches piano to eleven children and runs a choir at a church that pays four hundred dollars a month, in an apartment that is now three rooms instead of one, above the same hardware store, because I did not want to move her and because I have found that I like it.
And every April we drive out past a house we no longer own and park on the road for a few minutes, because there is a colony of house wrens that nests in the wisteria on the south wall and has done since before her father was born.
She counts them.
She is not very good at counting yet. She gets to about nine and starts again.
Last April she asked me why she is called Wren.
I told her that her daddy used to sit outside that house in the spring with a cup of coffee and count the birds, and that he loved them, and that I named her after the thing in that house that he loved.
She thought about it.
Then she said: "Is that why Mr. Emmett comes?"
I said, "What do you mean, sweetheart?"
And my daughter, who is four, said: "He counts them too. He does it in the car. He thinks I'm asleep."
I did not turn around.
I sat in the driver's seat of a Honda on a road in Ashgrove, Connecticut, looking at a wisteria on a wall of a house that had belonged to a man who chose his son, and I said, "Yes. That's why he comes."
And she said okay, and asked for a snack, and we drove home.