Mason sat beside the window, staring at a folded piece of paper Claire had given him.
Henry noticed that the edges had been opened and closed so many times they had begun to fray.
“What does it say?” he asked.
Mason handed it to him.
There were only three lines.
Take the flight. Meet Anna Adler. Do not decide what the truth means until you have heard all of it.
Below the message was an address near the old city.
Henry traced the letters with his thumb.
Claire had written those words while still alive, believing she would be waiting at the end of the journey.
The thought was almost more painful than remembering the hospital.
At the airport, Henry’s driver was waiting beside a dark sedan. Mason stopped several feet away.
“I can take the train.”
“You can,” Henry said. “But Anna Adler’s office is expecting both of us.”
Mason looked at Nora, who had begun to wake.
“Is she coming too?”
“I’m not leaving her.”
Mason nodded. “Good.”
They drove through Zurich in silence.
The rain had stopped, but water still clung to the windows and turned passing lights into pale streaks. Cyclists moved along the river. Cafés were opening, their chairs arranged beneath striped awnings. The city seemed calm in a way Henry found almost disorienting.
Anna Adler’s office occupied the second floor of an old stone building on a narrow street near the Limmat River.
There was no polished reception desk or row of assistants. Only a brass plaque, a quiet hallway, and the faint scent of paper and beeswax.
Anna Adler herself opened the door.
She was a tall woman in her sixties with silver hair cut neatly at her jaw. Her expression softened when she saw Mason.
Then she looked at Henry and the baby in his arms.
“I am very sorry about Claire,” she said.
Henry nodded, unable to offer the usual polite response.
Anna led them into a book-lined room. A wooden box rested on the table.
“I expected Claire to be with you,” she said. “When Ms. Levin contacted me from Boston, I understood that this meeting would be different from what she planned.”
“Why did my wife come to you?” Henry asked.
“Because some records are protected by Swiss privacy law, and others had been deposited with my father’s office many years ago.”
“What records?”
Anna looked at Mason.
“Records concerning Rachel Brooks.”
Mason sat forward.
“My mother?”
“Yes.”
Anna opened the wooden box.
Inside were several envelopes tied with a faded blue ribbon, a small leather notebook, and a black-and-white photograph.
She placed the photograph on the table.
It showed a young woman standing beside Lake Zurich. She could not have been more than nineteen. She wore a light summer dress, and her hair blew across her face.
