“Yes. Central Park West. It’s a quiet neighborhood. Safe.”

Exclusive, Phillip thought. No trendy East Village for Dr. Griffin. “Couple of bedrooms?”

“Yes. I use the second as my office.”

He could almost see it. Tidy, organized, attractive. “I guess that’s where Seth slept.”

“No, Gloria took that room. We put Seth on the living room sofa. He was just a little boy.”

“They just showed up on your doorstep one day.”

“More or less. I hadn’t seen her in years. I knew about Seth. She’d called me when the man she’d married left her. I sent her money off and on. I didn’t want her to come. I never said she couldn’t, but I didn’t want her to come. She’s so . . . disruptive, so difficult.”

“But she did come.”

“Yes. I came back from a lecture one afternoon and she was waiting outside the building. She was furious because the doorman wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t let her go up to my apartment. Seth was crying, and she was screaming. It was just . . .” She sighed. “Typical, I suppose.”

“But you let her in.”

“I couldn’t just send her away. All she had was this little boy and a backpack. She begged me to let them stay for a while. She said she’d been hitchhiking. That she was broke. She started crying, and Seth just crawled onto the couch and fell asleep. He must have been exhausted.”

“How long did they stay?”

“A few weeks.” Her mind began to drift between then and now, sliding back and forth in time. “I was going to help her get a job, but she said she needed to rest first. She said she’d been sick. Then she said a truck driver in Oklahoma had raped her. I knew she was lying, but . . .”

“She was your sister.”

“No, no.” She said it wearily. “If I’d been honest, I would have admitted that that had stopped mattering years before. But Seth was . . . He hardly spoke. I didn’t know anything about children, but I got a book and it indicated he should have been much more verbal.”

He nearly smiled. It was so easy to picture her selecting the proper book, studying it, trying to put everything in order.

“He was like this little ghost,” she murmured. “This little shadow in the apartment. When Gloria would go out for any length of time and leave him with me, he’d creep out a little. And the first night she didn’t come home until morning, he had a nightmare.”

“And you let him sleep with you and told him a story.”

“The Frog Prince. My nanny told it to me. She liked fairy tales. He was afraid of the dark. I used to be afraid of the dark.” Her voice was thick and slow with fatigue. “I used to want to sleep in my parents’ bed when I was afraid, but I wasn’t allowed to. But . . . I didn’t think it would hurt him, just for a little while.”