I said nothing. I reminded myself that Gavin was only twelve years my senior, not two or three decades.
“Are you asking because you think he might have had something to do with your mom’s disappearance?” Heather went on.
“She didn’t disappear,” I told her. “She’s dead. For all we know, someone killed her.”
“God. Doesn’t that sentence freaking terrify you? My parents actually bought an alarm system for our home after it happened. I’m not sure they used to bother to lock the doors before then. And Ellen’s mom? I gather she won’t even leave the house at night.”
I thought about this. “Everyone tells us we have no reason to be scared,” I said. I recalled how Gavin had reassured me.
“But your mom was sleepwalking when she left the house, right?”
“Right,” I said. But something clicked as I spoke. We didn’t know that now, did we? All we knew for sure was that she had left the house in her nightgown.
“So, something happened to her when she went outside in the middle of the night,” Heather was saying. “If she didn’t sleepwalk, she’d still be alive.”
An idea hovered, hazy and embryonic, just beyond my reach. But it was out there. I got off the phone as quickly as I could. I called my secret vice. The next morning I met him for breakfast.
“The name of the firm was Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw,” I told Gavin. The two of us were meeting at a diner in Waterbury near his office, and we had both ordered waffles for the simple reason that we wanted maple syrup. The waffles themselves, he had warned me, would taste a little like paste. They did.
“I know,” he said. “We’ve talked to people there. We’ve talked to her former clients from that period in her life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that anyone there would have wanted to hurt your mother.”
“I figured you’d talked to them. That’s not where this is going. Sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry.”
“Here’s what I was hoping you could find out. Paige is twelve. Her birthday is March eighteenth. She was born March 18, 1988. But she was premature. She was due a month later—the middle of April. So she was conceived the previous June. My mom was still working for Lewis, Fowler, DeGraw then. I want to know if she was on any business trips early that summer.”
“Because you don’t believe that your father is Paige’s father?”
“Maybe he is,” I said. “But maybe not—because of the chromosomal abnormalities I told you about. I mean, look at the timing. My mother has a decade of miscarriages. She suddenly gets pregnant. She leaves the firm and stops traveling.”
“And so you think that Paige’s father is a man she met while on a business trip.”
“I’m just saying it’s possible. Perhaps my mom had a sleep sex encounter in a hotel and that’s how Paige was conceived. Have you investigated that?”
“I can’t say that we have.”
I smiled. “Chalk one up for the novice.”
“How does this connect to your mom’s death?”
“Maybe she was meeting Paige’s father the night she was killed.”
“So she wasn’t sleepwalking.”
“That’s right.”
He made a pyramid with his fingers, his elbows on the table, and leaned into his hands. “Your theory is that your mother left the house in the middle of the night in her nightshirt, barefoot, to meet a man she had had sleep sex with in some hotel far from Vermont thirteen years ago. And then he killed her and threw her body into the river.”
“It only sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud.”
“Sorry.” He looked at the silver bracelet on my wrist. “Is that new?”
“No. It was my mom’s.” I was relieved she hadn’t worn it around him.
“It’s pretty. The blue matches your eyes.”
“Tell me,” I said, afraid he was trying to change the subject, “did my mom ever say anything to you about Paige and sleep sex? The chronology just makes so much sense. And she told Marilyn Bryce that she thought she might have had sleep sex at least once at a hotel when she was still traveling for work.”
“Okay, this is going to sound way more dismissive than I mean it to be. Forgive me. But you are really cute, and I think you have way too much time on your hands.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I shouldn’t because this is an open investigation. And I shouldn’t because it’s not fair to your mother to share with you those sorts of confidences—the things she told me in our little support group.”
“But you will,” I said, smiling.
He pulled his hands apart and sat back. “No,” he said. “I won’t.”
“Will you look into my theory?”
“That Paige is a sleep sex baby?”
“God, there’s a term for it.”
“There’s a term for everything. You’re Warren Ahlberg’s daughter. You know that as well as anyone.”
“And is Paige his daughter, too?”
“Absolutely. Whether she has his DNA is irrelevant.”
“Is that a hint?”