Ethan arrived on the six o’clock flight.
I had arranged it with the school, then with the car, then with the hotel, and somewhere in the middle of all that arranging I had also tried to work out what exactly I was going to say. This was harder than the logistics. The logistics had clear steps. What you said to a seven-year-old about a family history that stretched back thirty years and involved two fortunes, a secret pregnancy, a paid relocation, and a grandmother who had dismantled his parents’ marriage to protect a reputation was not something that came with clear steps.
He walked through the hotel room door with his backpack on and Gerald under one arm and looked around the room with the particular assessment of someone checking whether anything had changed since he last saw me. He al
