But in the following years Domi appeared again and again, in small sharp flashes. Donations to women’s shelters, to food banks, to union groups. Donations for health-care assistance. Donations to libraries, a string of them, all over New York, here and there all over the country. Margaret watched, holding these acts up to the Domi she’d once known, as if holding a sealed letter to the light. The night before she left, she’d scribbled down that address on Park Avenue—the one person who might help, the only person left besides Ethan who’d ever cared about her—and hidden it in the safest place she could think of, because it was too painful to go without leaving even one bread crumb behind.
And here she was. Life had a strange symmetry, she thought: years ago she’d left Domi to take refuge with Ethan; now it was the other way around. Domi touched Margaret’s arm, and her hands, once red and chapped from the cold as she clutched Margaret’s in the night, were soft and pale, like just-risen dough. Margaret kissed her on the cheek and it, too, was tender, so tender she expected to see the imprint of her lips on Domi’s skin.
It’s good to see you, Domi said.
* * *
? ? ?
In the end Domi had decided to hide, too. At the depth of the Crisis, around the time Margaret had left New York, Domi had called her father. Help me, she said, and he’d sent a car within the hour. He’d whisked her out of New York to the safety of the countryside, a summer cabin in Connecticut she hadn’t seen since she was a child, which her father had built when the land had been cheap, before his company took off, before they’d had any real money. When he’d still just been Claude Duchess, a young upstart businessman; when her mother had still been alive. Over the years, as his company had grown, he’d acquired the parcels of land around it, chipping out a larger and larger pocket of wilderness around them; he’d added a powerful generator, a fresh coat of paint—but it still bore the traces of what it had been, just a simple house set away from everything, beside a rocky little ocean inlet. So when he wanted to escape the unrest in the city, what better place than here, in the past, a time when everything was still in the future for him, when the world was nothing but possibility? Here alone, out of all his houses, they did not have to hear protests in the streets or the eerie silences in between; here, there was nothing but the constant whoosh of the ocean’s waves. Here, they could pretend they were not eating cake while everyone else had no bread.
Domi had stepped inside, steel-toed boots clumping against the polished wooden floors, flecks of city grit still ground into her roughened palms. There was her stepmother on the leather sofa, reading a magazine, but her bedroom was exactly as she remembered: the way her own mother had decorated it in her childhood, all pink and lace and pearls. Welcome home, her father had said awkwardly. Elsa had grudgingly left her alone, and that was how they’d weathered the Crisis, the three of them: circling each other at a distance, trapped like flies in the amber of the past. Their fortune vast as a mammoth ship, unswayed by the currents and waves that buffeted smaller, lesser boats. They could order what they needed, afford whatever it took, for as long as it took. All they had to do was wait.
A few months after PACT passed, Domi’s father and Elsa were headed to the Maldives—a weekend vacation, to celebrate the return to normal—when their private plane crashed into the Pacific. Everything had gone to Domi: the houses in Malibu and Provence; the apartment in the 16th arrondissement and the townhouse here on Park; the electronics empire, smaller than before the Crisis, but still ticking out crucial parts for phones and smartwatches, still more than enough to support all this. And all the secrets too: accusations from her father’s factories in Hanoi and Shenzhen, complaints about long hours, hazardous materials, years of ignored reports. The donations to senators who’d passed tax cuts and exemptions for men like him, who’d go on to champion PACT and everything that came after. All hers now, to tabulate and reckon and repay.
I’m finding out, says Domi, some of things he did. For me, or so he thought.
She and Margaret were sitting in the glass-roofed courtyard—the winter garden, Domi called it—glasses of iced tea sweating in their hands. A square pocket of green lined with potted arborvitae, carved into the belly of this vault of a house. Rooms of sturdy furniture and solid brick fortressed them on four sides, filled with all the fine trinkets Domi’s father had collected and kept. Above, thick glass sheltered them from possible rain. They could not be seen or heard from outside; for the first time in weeks, Margaret found she could catch her breath. And yet she felt like an insect sealed in a jar.
So now what, Domi said. What are you going to do? Hole up here, forever, with me? Get a fake passport and flee the country?
There was the faintest whiff of mockery in her voice, and Margaret couldn’t tell if it was aimed at her, or at Domi herself. Of course there were places where a person could hide: Margaret could take a new name, lie low. Keep her head down; start again. She thought again of her parents, how they’d lived their whole lives trying to avoid trouble, and in the end it had ferreted them out anyway. Maybe sometimes, she thought, the bird with its head held high took flight. Maybe sometimes, the nail that stuck up pierced the foot that stomped down.
Not hiding, she said. Something else.
The idea was not fully formed in her mind yet, only a need: the need to make up for years of choosing to look away, of remaining deliberately incurious. For thinking that it didn’t matter as long as it was somebody else’s child. It was just starting to come to her, the seeds of it barely beginning to root: what she would do with these stories, the messages of hope and love and care and longing. She would go out and gather them, like grains of rice gleaned from threshed-out fields. She would find as many as she could.
To Domi, she said: I need your help.
* * *
? ? ?
All over the country, zigging and zagging, she traced the flow of information. Emails could be hacked, calls intercepted. But libraries shared books all the time; pooling information was part of their work. Crates of books shuttled between them, crammed with loaned bounty: rare texts on obscure painters, guidebooks on esoteric hobbies. It was the librarians’ job to sort these books, to label each with a slip bearing the requester’s name, to set them on the shelf behind the counter in neat rows, ready to be claimed.