Are you okay?” Sage asks.

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking you that.”

She sits up. “Where’s Adam?”

Wow. Just like that, an invisible wall cleaves the space between us. I rock back on my heels, putting distance between the couch where she’s lying and myself. “Of course,” I say formally. “I’ll get him for you.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to get him.” Sage’s voice is as thin as a twig. “How did you know...”

She doesn’t finish her sentence; she doesn’t have to. “I called you when I got back to D.C. But you didn’t pick up the phone. I started to get worried—I know you think a ninety-five-year-old isn’t a threat, but I’ve seen guys that age pull a gun on a federal agent. Anyway, someone finally answered. Your sister Saffron. She told me about Minka.” I look at her. “I’m so sorry, Sage. Your grandmother was a very special woman.”

“What are you doing here, Leo?”

“I think that should be pretty obvious—”

“I know you’re here for the funeral,” she interrupts. “But why?”

Various reasons run through my head: because being here is the right thing to do; because there is a precedent in the office for coming to the funerals of survivors who’ve been witnesses; because Minka was part of my investigation. But really, the reason I am here is that I wanted to be, for Sage. “I didn’t know your grandmother, of course, the way you did. But I could tell just by the way she looked at you when you didn’t know she was looking that family came first, for her. It’s like that for a lot of Jews. Almost as if it’s in the collective unconscious, because once, it got taken away.” I glance at Sage. “Today, I thought maybe I could be your family.”

At first Sage doesn’t move. Then I realize that tears are streaming down her cheeks. I reach for her, right through that invisible wall, until I am holding her hand. “So, no biggie, but is this good crying, like you’re happy to set another place at Thanksgiving, or bad crying, like you just found out your long-lost relative is a creeper?”

A laugh bubbles out of her. “I don’t know how you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it so I can breathe again,” Sage says. “But thank you.”

Whatever barrier I thought was between us is completely gone now. I sit next to her on the couch, and Sage rests her head on my shoulder, simply, as if she has been doing it her whole life. “What if we did this to her?”

“You mean by getting her to talk about what happened?”

She nods. “I can’t shake the feeling that if I hadn’t ever brought it up—if you hadn’t shown her the pictures...”

“You don’t know that. Stop beating yourself up.”

“It just feels so anticlimactic, you know?” she says, her voice small. “To survive the Holocaust, and then die in her sleep. What’s the point?”

I think for a moment. “The point is that she got to die in her sleep. After having lunch with her granddaughter, and a very dapper, charming attorney.” I am still holding Sage Singer’s hand. Her fingers fit seamlessly between mine. “Maybe she didn’t die upset. Maybe she let go, Sage, because she finally felt like everything was going to be okay.”

• • •

It is by all accounts a lovely service, but I don’t pay attention. I’m too busy looking around the room to see if Reiner Hartmann shows up, because there’s still a part of me that believes it’s possible. When I realize that he’s probably not going to come, I focus my attention on Adam, who is standing unobtrusively near the back of the sanctuary the way a funeral director should, trying hard not to stare at me every time Sage grabs on to my arm or buries her face in the sleeve of my suit jacket.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21