Chapter 6 — TWENTY-SIX YEARS

The thing about Emmett Cole is that I could not have told you one fact about him.

I had known him for two years.

He had driven me from that house to the train station probably forty times. He had carried my bags. He had stood at the back of my wedding photographs in a grey suit, in the row where the staff stood, because Margot had arranged the photographs that way and I had not said anything about it, and I have thought about that a lot since.

Here is the sum total of what I knew about Emmett Cole on the fourteenth of October.

He was around sixty. He was bald and had been for as long as anyone had photographs of. He had a scar through his left eyebrow. He wore a black suit every day including Sundays. He kept the cars immaculate and the gravel raked and he called Margot ma'am and Adam sir, which Adam had hated and had asked him to stop doing about four hundred times.

I did not know if he was married.

I did not know where he was from.

I did not know his first name until the 911 tape, because for two years I had called him Mr. Cole and he had never corrected me.

He came to the hospital on the third day.

He stood in the doorway with a paper bag and did not come in until I told him to twice.

In the bag was a phone charger, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, three pairs of socks, and a plastic tub of cut mango.

I have never in my life been so undone by a piece of fruit.

"How did you know?"

"You ate it every morning for six weeks after the funeral," he said. "Off the blue plate. In the kitchen at six because you didn't want to see anybody."

"You were there at six?"

"I'm there at five."

He sat in the chair by the window and did not take his coat off, which is a thing people do when they have promised themselves they will not stay long.

I said, "You lost your job for me."

"No."

"She said don't come back."

"I know what she said."

"Emmett, that's twenty-six years."

He looked at the window for a while.

"Mrs. Thorne, can I say something you're going to think is strange?"

"Yes."

"I have been waiting for something like that phone call for a long time." He turned the hat over in his hands. He was still wearing the suit. "Not that. Never that. But something. A reason."

"A reason for what?"

He did not answer that.

He asked about the baby's heart rate and he asked whether they were letting me walk yet, and then he said he would come back Thursday, and he did, and on Thursday he brought mango again, and on the Thursday after that I had a daughter and he did not come at all because he had not been told and he did not consider himself family enough to ask.

The last thing he said on that third day, at the door, was this.

"When they read the will. The estate one, not Adam's."

"There's nothing in it for me. Margot made that very clear."

"When they read it," he said, "listen to clause eleven."

Then he said goodnight and went down the corridor, and I lay there for two hours trying to work out how a man who had spent twenty-six years parking cars knew the numbering of a will he had never been read.