“It’s okay, Eileen.”
“Anyway, I think she sort of hero-worshipped her mom. Professor van de Beek is also the freshman counselor for students who want to go into medicine.”
Simon swallowed. “Paige wanted to be a physician?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
The revelation crushed him anew. Paige had wanted to be a doctor. Like her mother.
“Anyway,” Eileen continued, “I don’t think this has anything to do with her meeting Aaron, but Professor van de Beek was a big part of her life here.”
They crossed in front of Ratner dormitory, where Paige and Eileen had lived freshman year, walking right across the spot where Simon had hugged his daughter goodbye a lifetime ago.
The painful hits just kept coming.
When Eileen spotted some friends in front of the Isherwood building, she told Simon that her class was inside and bid him a quick goodbye. He waved as she left and then headed over to Clark House. When he entered the front foyer, an older woman with a face that had seen it all before the Eisenhower administration sat behind the desk and scowled at him.
A small nameplate read MRS. DINSMORE. No first name.
“May I help you?” Mrs. Dinsmore said in a voice that indicated any help would come very reluctantly.
“I’m looking for Professor van de Beek.”
“You won’t find him.”
“Pardon?”
“Professor van de Beek is on sabbatical.”
“Since when?”
“I’m not at liberty to answer any additional questions on the matter.”
“Is he around or is he traveling?”
Mrs. Dinsmore had a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck. She put them on now and frowned with even more disapproval. “What part of ‘not at liberty to answer’ did you find confusing?”
Simon had Louis van de Beek’s email from that web directory. That seemed the more prudent way to go. “You’ve been a delight, thank you.”
“I aim to please,” Mrs. Dinsmore replied, head down, writing something down.
Simon headed back toward his car. He called Yvonne and heard yet again how nothing with Ingrid’s condition had changed. He wanted to ask a million questions, but an odd memory came to him. Early in his relationship with Ingrid, Simon worried about the overseas markets and political upheaval and upcoming earnings reports — anything that could affect his clients’ portfolios. That was natural enough, part of the job on the surface, but it actually made him a less focused and less effective financial analyst.
“The serenity prayer,” Ingrid had told him one night. She’d been sitting at the computer, wearing one of his dress shirts, her back to him.
“What?”
He came up behind her and rested his hands on his beautiful wife’s shoulders. The printer whirred. She reached for a sheet of paper and handed it to him.
“Put this on your desk,” she said.
He should have been familiar with the prayer, of course, but he wasn’t. He read it, and odd as this sounds, it changed his life almost immediately:
God, grant me the SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change,
The COURAGE to change the things I can,
The WISDOM to know the difference.
No, Simon wasn’t religious in the least and the prayer was short and obvious. Yet it resonated. And more than that, it resonated with Ingrid. He couldn’t change Ingrid’s condition. She was comatose in a hospital, the pain of that constant and ripping, but he had to let it go because it was foolhardy to think he could change that fact now.
He couldn’t.
So accept that. Let it go. Change the things that he could.
Like finding his daughter.
When Simon reached his car, he called Elena Ramirez.
“Anything?” he asked.
“You first.”
“Paige came to Aaron, not the other way around. I always thought that they met near Lanford College. But she sought him out.”
“So she knew him before?”
“Somehow.”
“Probably met online. A dating app or something.”
“Why would she have been on a dating app?”
“Why is anyone?”
“She’s a college freshman, all caught up in her studies and new friends. And that’s not my Dad goggles talking.”
“Dad goggles?”
“You know. Bias. Seeing your kids through Dad goggles.”
“Oh, right.”
“This was what Paige was like, according to her roommate, not me. Did you talk to the guy at the tattoo parlor yet?”
“Damien Gorse. Stick with me first, Simon. Is there anything else you think I should know?”
“Just something really weird about Aaron’s upbringing. Or his parentage anyway.”
“Tell me.”
So Simon filled her in on the story Enid told him about Aaron and Wiley’s tale of a dead Italian mother. When he finished, there was silence on the other end of the phone. Then he heard her tapping on a keyboard.
“Elena?”
“I’m trying to Google photographs of Aaron and his father.”
“Why?”
There was a pause.
“I don’t see any. I see some of the father at the inn. Wiley.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“This is going to sound weird,” she began.
“But?”
“But you’ve seen both Aaron and Wiley in person.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they are father and son? I mean, biologically.”
“No.” Simon said it that fast, without really processing his response. “I mean... look, I don’t know. Something is off. Why?”
“It might be nothing.”
“But?”
“But Henry Thorpe was adopted,” Elena said. “So was Damien Gorse.”
Simon felt a chill, but he still said, “You’re reaching.”
“I know.”
“Paige wasn’t adopted.”
“I know that too.”
“Elena?”
“Yes?”
“What did Damien Gorse tell you?”
“Nothing, Simon. Gorse is dead. Someone murdered him too.”
Chapter Twenty
Ash always tried to be prepared.
There were fresh clothes in the car for both of them. They managed to change on the move and dumped the old clothes in a charity bin behind a Whole Foods near the New York state border. At a Rite Aid, Dee Dee, donning a baseball cap, bought ten items, but only two really mattered — hair dye and a scissors.
He didn’t go in with her.
There were cameras everywhere. Let them look for a lone woman or lone man. Confuse them. Don’t stay anyplace too long.
Dee Dee had thought she could just color her hair in the Rite Aid bathroom. Ash told her that would be a mistake.
Keep moving. Don’t give them anything to go on.
They drove another ten miles and found an old-school gas station — poorer CCTV, Ash figured. Dee Dee headed into the bathroom wearing the baseball cap. Using the newly bought scissors, she sawed off the long blonde braid and cropped her hair close, then she flushed the cut hair down the toilet. She dyed the shorter locks a subtle auburn, nothing too striking, and put the cap back on her head.
Ash had told her: Always walk with your head tilted down. CCTV cameras shot from above. Always. So wear a cap with a bill and keep your eyes on the ground. Sometimes, depending on the weather, sunglasses were a good idea. Other times, they drew the wrong kind of attention.
“This is overkill,” Dee Dee said.
“Probably.”
But she didn’t argue — and if Dee Dee really had an issue with his precautions, she’d argue.
Once they were back on the road, Dee Dee took off the cap and mussed her hair with her hand. “How do I look?”
He risked a look and felt the ka-boom in his heart.
Dee Dee pulled her knees up to her chest and fell asleep in the seat next to him. Ash kept sneaking glances at her. At a red light, he rolled up a shirt he’d kept in the backseat and placed it between her head and the car door, just to make sure she was comfortable and didn’t hurt herself.