I had imagined many versions of how I might see my son again. In some of them, he came to me alone. In some, he came in sorrow after a fight with his wife.
In some, he arrived because age had finally taught him that a mother is not a piece of furniture you can drape a sheet over and pretend no longer exists. I had even imagined the dramatic versions that come to women who have spent too much time alone in large houses. David appearing in the middle of a snowstorm.
David turning up after a funeral. David standing beneath my front steps with an apology already waiting on his tongue. I had not imagined this.
I had not imagined a crisp December morning in Beacon Hill, the kind where the brick sidewalks hold the cold and the sky over Boston Harbor looks as if it has been washed clean with steel wool. I had not imagined looking down from my third-floor bedroom window and seeing my son standing behind the wrought-iron gates like a visitor at a historic estate. And I certainly had not imagined seeing Samantha step out of a black Mercedes behind him, smoothing the front of her cream wool coat and lifting her chin toward my house with that same appraising smile I had come to recognize as a warning.
Seventeen years. That was how long it had been since I was allowed into my son’s ordinary life. Seventeen Christmases spent setting a table too beautifully for the number of people who actually sat at it.
Seventeen seasons of wreaths on the front doors, silver ribbon on the banisters, candles in every window, and no grandchildren racing through the hallways. I kept one hand on the silk curtain and one against the old ache beneath my ribs. “Mrs.
Whitmore?”
Rosa stood in the doorway. She had worked for our family for twenty years, long enough to know the moods of the house, long enough to recognize the particular stillness that fell over me whenever David’s name came near a room. “There are people at the gate,” she said softly.
“They’re asking to see you.”
“I know who they are. Open the gates.”
She hesitated. “Are you sure, Señora?
Maybe Mr. Patterson should be here first.”
Patterson was my attorney. Sharp, discreet, never rattled.
He had helped me through Charles’s death, the probate work, and more recently, had helped me set certain plans quietly into motion. “No,” I said. “Not yet.
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