Chapter 9: Home Early

Nolan Fairchild opened the hospital door and found a tall woman in a camel coat looking him over.

"Mr. Fairchild," Margaret Harrow said. "Your name is on the structural stamp of my late husband's first building."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then you're a man who checks a foundation before he stands on it."

"I try to be."

"Stay inside," she said, and she stepped into the room behind him without another word.

Nolan did not stay.

He had somewhere to be, and he had been rehearsing it for three weeks.

He took a taxi to his own front door at five in the afternoon with a rolling suitcase he had borrowed from a hotel.

He pressed the bell.

Selena opened it in a pale blue dress, with her hair brushed and her lipstick fresh.

For one second her face was blank.

Then she screamed his name and threw her arms around his neck.

"You're home! Why didn't you say? You said another six months!"

"The project ended early," Nolan said. He held her with one arm and kept the other hand on the suitcase. "I wanted to surprise you."

She felt small and warm against him.

He had once thought that meant something.

"You did," she said. She was crying now, or doing what looked like it. "Oh, Nolan, you haven't even seen him."

She pulled him inside.

The hall smelled of baby powder and the wrong cologne.

It was Calvin's. It was in the wood of the staircase and the folds of the sofa, where Calvin had slept for a year.

Calvin himself stood at the foot of the stairs with a baby on his arm.

He had been caught in the middle of something. Nolan could see the exact moment he decided what to do with his face.

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