“Where is your sister now?”
“With our grandmother in Maine. That’s where I live too, except during the school term. I have a scholarship at a boarding school outside Boston.”
“Did Claire arrange that?”
“No. My mother did before she died. Claire helped with the things the scholarship didn’t cover. Books. Train tickets. Piano lessons.”
“Why?”
Mason’s jaw tightened. “I asked her that more than once.”
“And?”
“She said my mother had once helped someone in her family. She said she was returning a kindness.”
Henry leaned back.
Claire had no surviving siblings. Her father had died before Henry met her, and her mother, Margaret, had passed away four years earlier. Claire rarely spoke about her childhood except in fragments: summers near the coast, piano lessons she had hated, a mother who saved every letter she received.
“What kind of kindness?”
“She never explained.”
“You never pressed her?”
“I did. She said she would tell me when she was certain.”
“Certain of what?”
Mason looked toward the photograph.
“That we were connected.”
The aircraft hummed around them.
Henry felt an old, familiar instinct awaken—the instinct that had made him successful. When information was incomplete, he assembled facts. When people avoided direct answers, he looked for what they feared revealing.
Claire had found Mason at a music program.
She had known his dead mother.
She knew a lullaby Rachel Brooks had sung to her children.
And she had given Mason a photograph with a message written in Henry’s wife’s handwriting.
“Why are you going to Zurich?” Henry asked.
Mason shifted again.
“I’m supposed to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“A woman named Anna Adler.”
Henry waited.
“That’s all you know?”
“She sent me a plane ticket and an address. Claire told me the trip would explain everything.”
“When did Claire tell you that?”
“About five weeks ago.”
Five weeks.
Claire had been eight months pregnant.
Henry remembered that time as a blur of appointments, nursery furniture, and late-night conversations about whether they were ready to become parents. Claire had seemed distracted, but he had assumed she was nervous about the birth.
“Did she plan to travel with you?”
“She said she would already be in Zurich.”
Henry turned toward the darkened window.
He and Claire had been scheduled to make this journey together.
It was meant to be their final trip before retreating from public life for several months. Henry had business meetings in Zurich, and Claire had told him she wanted to settle a personal matter while they were there.
After her death, Henry had canceled almost everything.
But one of Claire’s doctors had recommended a specialist in Switzerland who could review Nora’s early medical records. Henry had resisted traveling with a newborn, yet remaining in the silent house they had prepared together had become unbearable.
So he had kept the flight.
Had Claire known Mason would be on it?
Had she arranged their meeting?
Or was this only chance?
Henry opened his phone and connected to the aircraft’s wireless network. Several messages waited from employees, advisors, and board members. He ignored them.
Instead, he wrote to Mara Levin, the attorney who had handled Claire’s personal affairs.
Do you know anyone named Mason Brooks or Anna Adler?
He added a photograph of the picture and sent it.
