Chapter 222
Chapter 221: Nick’s School
CAMERON
I knew this neighbourhood. I had known since the months when Marcus Reeve was sending me location data I had not shared with Sedona because sharing it would have required explaining why I had it, and that explanation belonged to a conversation we hadn’t been ready for. I knew which corner had the coffee shop Logan used on Thursday mornings.
I knew the parking structure two blocks from his building. I knew the school because I had looked it up and then driven past it once, alone, on a Tuesday in October. Knowing had felt necessary even then, when doing anything with the knowledge wasn’t possible yet.
I did not say so neither did I behaved it. I drove the twenty minutes through Lincoln Park and into the quieter residential grid and I said nothing about what I knew, because some information had a time and this wasn’t it.
The school was red-brick, mid-rise, the clean institutional quality of somewhere that had a waiting list and knew it. A gateman in a dark jacket. A parent pickup lane that was already beginning to fill at three o’clock, vehicles pulling in with the practiced efficiency of people who did this every day. The noise hadn’t started yet, it was still twelve minutes before the bell, but the particular anticipatory energy of a school approaching closing time was already in the street.
I parked on the opposite side, two car lengths back from the gate. The SUV had tinted windows. Nobody could see in.
I turned off the engine.
The car did not make a sound.
Eight people in an SUV, all pretending to be calm, produced a specific atmospheric pressure.
My mother had a handkerchief. She was not using it yet. She had it in both hands in her lap and she was looking at the school gate with the focused stillness of someone who had been waiting for this for a long time and had decided that waiting a few more minutes was something she could manage.
My father was beside her. He was looking at the gate with the expression he used when he had decided something was important and was committing it to memory, the way he had looked at the Japanese maple when Sedona was born, the way he had looked at Nick’s blue card when Sedona showed it to us. Not performing the feeling. Storing it.
Lucian had his hand on Lake’s shoulder. Lake was kneeling on the backseat to see better, forehead near the window, breath starting to fog the glass slightly before Lucian made a small adjustment and redirected him back from it.
“What does he look like?” Lake had asked on the drive over. Three times, in the way he repeated things until the answer was complete enough.
“Like his mum,” I had said.
Nick’s School p>
Lake had processed this and looked out the window and said nothing else.
Claim
Drew was beside him with his notebook closed on his knee, closed, which meant he wasn’t cataloguing, he was just being present. Drew made that distinction carefully.
Sedona was in the front passenger seat.
I had been monitoring her from my peripheral vision for the entire drive. She hadn’t said much. Her hands were in her lap. She was doing the thing she did when she was managing something large, the absolute stillness of it, all her attention compressed toward a single point somewhere ahead of us. Dr. Mitchell’s accounting, maybe. Tracking the differences. Staying in the body rather than ahead of it. I said nothing.
There was nothing to say until three-fifteen. The bell was internal but its effect was immediate, the gate opened and the noise arrived all at once, several hundred children released into a December afternoon at the same time. They came out in the formations of children who had spent six hours together: pairs, threes, a loose group mid-argument, one child moving fast with somewhere specific to be.
I watched the gate.
I watched Sedona.
She was scanning the stream with the precision of someone who had studied a photograph for months and now had to match it to a real child, moving, in a crowd. Her eyes moved across the gate. Across the children coming through. Back. Forward.
Then her breath changed.
It was a small thing. A single breath, slightly different from the ones before it, not sharp, not audible, just altered. The stillness broke into something else. Something I didn’t have a precise word for. Larger than relief. Quieter than joy. The particular quality of something that has been carried as an abstraction for a long time and has just, without warning, become real.
“There,” she said.
I followed her eyeline.
Nick Hayes was in a group of three boys, mid-argument, gesturing with the full-body expressiveness of a child who had opinions and was deploying all of them. Backpack on one shoulder, slightly lopsided. Dark coat. Something in the set of his chin when he made his point, a particular angle of certainty I recognized without being able to say immediately where I recognized it from.
I had seen him once. In the hospital corridor, ten months ago, when I had come to Chicago to get Sedona and my attention had been entirely on Logan and Catherine and the cold specific fury of a man who had arrived too late and was not going to let himself arrive too late again. Nick had been there. I had registered him the way you registered the furniture in a room when the room was on fire, present, noted, not processed.
I processed him now.
“He looks exactly like you,” I said.
“I know,” Sedona said.
From the backseat Lake said: “He is very tall for his age p>
Drew said, quietly: “He looks like Aunt Sedona p> Claim Nick had cleared the main stream of children. He was at the gate now, slowing, doing the visual sweep of the pickup lane, the practiced scan of someone who knew this routine and knew what he was looking for. Mrs. Peterson’s car. The familiar vehicle in the familiar position. His eyes moved along the line. Past the first car. The second. The gap where the lane curved. They reached our SUV. They stopped. He was looking directly at us. The car was silent in the way that eight people holding their breath produced silence, total, pressurized, the silence of a moment that had not yet decided what it was going to be. I did not move and nobody moved. Nick stood at the gate in his lopsided backpack and looked at a tinted window on a December afternoon, squinting his eyes as if trying to confirm what he was seeing. Comments LUCK DRAW > Vote 545 The Phone Catt-A-The Gate Claim Florence A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.