Chapter 1 - The Boy With the Photograph
The housing clerk pushed my paperwork back under the glass as if the apartment where my son and I slept wasn't already flooding.
"Your application is incomplete," she said. "Come back when your landlord signs the income verification."
"He won't sign it," I answered. "He's the reason we need emergency housing."
Leo tightened his fingers around mine. At seven, he knew the sound of someone saying no before the person finished the sentence.
"Mom," he whispered, "is the ceiling going to fall again?"
I could feel other people listening. A man by the water dispenser looked up from his phone. Two women in the waiting area stared at the papers in my hand, then politely away.
Before I could answer, Leo let go.
He ran across the office toward a tall man in a dark blue coat who had just stepped out of a meeting room.
"You look like my picture!" Leo shouted.
The man stopped.
I knew his face before he turned all the way around. The dark hair was shorter. There were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there eight years ago. But nothing about the way Roland Mercer held himself had changed.
Leo tugged at the man's sleeve and unfolded a creased photograph he'd carried since kindergarten. It showed Roland and me standing beside a lake, laughing into a camera someone else had held.
Roland looked from the picture to my son.
Then he looked at me.
"Teresa?"
I wanted to disappear into the line of people waiting for help.
Leo smiled at him, certain he'd solved a puzzle I had spent seven years trying not to put in front of him.
"My mom says you knew her when she was young."
Roland lowered himself until he was at the boy's eye level.
"I did," he said carefully.
"You have my nose."
His hand trembled when he took the photograph Leo offered.
He rose and spoke to me so quietly I almost couldn't hear him.
"Is he mine?"
I looked down at the papers that had brought us there. An eviction notice. Photographs of water marks above Leo's bed. A doctor's note about his asthma. A form the landlord refused to certify.
Seven years had not prepared me to answer that question in a government office.
Roland's expression hardened.
"You left without telling me."
"I left," I said. "But that's not the whole story."
The clerk cleared her throat. "Ma'am, you'll need to move along unless you have the completed packet."
Roland turned toward her.
"Can someone at least explain the alternate verification procedure?"
"And you are?"
"Roland Mercer. I'm here for the building safety consultation."
The clerk recognized the name and straightened, but I didn't. Not then. All I knew was that the man I'd loved when I was twenty-four was standing beside my child, and people had begun speaking to us as if a new person in the room made the missing paperwork less real.
I placed a hand on Leo's shoulder.
"We're going home," I said.
Leo looked devastated.
"But I found him."
Outside, the air smelled of cold rain and bus exhaust. Roland caught up with us beneath the office awning. He didn't touch my arm.
"I need to talk to you," he said.
"Not in front of him."
"Then tell me where you're staying."
I looked toward the bus stop. I had promised myself that if Roland ever reappeared, I would not beg him for money or explanations. I would speak to him only when I could do it without our son hearing every word.
"The Alder Street apartments," I said. "Unit 3B."
His face changed again.
"Alder Street?"
"Why?"
"I inspected that building last month. I wrote that the third floor wasn't safe for overnight occupancy until the water damage was repaired."
May you like
He looked at Leo's damp backpack and the little inhaler clipped to its strap.
"Teresa," he said, "why are you still living there?"
