“So this thing…” she said, “this abduction isn’t random?”

We heard a click, and the office door behind me slid open.

“It’s not random,” a man’s voice said.

I turned. All I saw at first was gray hair, green eyes, copper glasses. I looked down. He was wearing boat shoes.

They were scuffed.

And then he spoke again. “Happy birthday, Boo.”

Charlie looked around the room. He never wore a watch, and there were no windows, but he was pretty good at figuring out the passing of time, and he thought that he had been in that room for about five or six hours now. He’d been sitting or standing in the room, studying it, for all that time. There was nothing else to do. There was no furniture. The walls were made of brick, the floor concrete. He walked to a wall and looked at the ceiling, studying it again. A fluorescent strip illuminated the room, but it was too high to reach without something to step on.

He sat on the floor and thought about his mother. He hoped she hadn’t learned that these guys, whoever they were, had hauled him in here. She didn’t do so well in a crisis, and there certainly was nothing she could do for him now. Hell, it seemed there was nothing Charlie could do for himself. He’d tried to get out of the room for the first hour or so he was here, but with no window, no furniture and the door bolted tight, there wasn’t much effort to be made.

Charlie crossed his legs, deciding to practice his meditation. Really, what else was he going to do? He pondered for a long while why these guys had grabbed him, why he was sitting here in this windowless room. No one came to visit him. No one gave him any information. And so, he decided to just accept what was. He had been kidnapped, he guessed, and now he was in this brick room. Surely it would all work out. It always worked out for Charlie.

The door opened. A man he’d never seen before stepped inside. He was a handsome man in his midfor-ties. He wore his dark black hair with lots of product in it and a black suit that looked, to Charlie’s admittedly inexperienced eyes, to be expensive. Under the suit, he wore a mint-colored shirt along with a gray-and-ivory patterned tie. His expression was feral. Charlie had never before used the word feral, but that was exactly the word to describe it.

Charlie waited for the man to speak. He seemed to be doing the same thing-he stood with his arms crossed, staring at Charlie and leaning against the door. It occurred to him that maybe the man had been taken, also.

“Did they get you, too?” Charlie asked.

The man didn’t respond. Charlie was pretty sure this guy wasn’t a fellow kidnappee. (Was that even a word? Was that what they called someone who’d been kidnapped? He reminded himself to look it up in the future.)

Charlie eyed the door. If he could get around the guy…

“Don’t even think about it,” the guy said.

Ah, Charlie thought, a kidnapp-ER.

Charlie studied the guy back. Who was he? What did he want?

But Charlie didn’t get much further than that in his thoughts.

Like a tiger, the man took three quick steps and was at Charlie’s side. At the same time, he raised his left hand and-whack!-hit Charlie with the back of that hand.

Charlie heard the crack, felt himself bite into his lip.

“Jesus!” Charlie yelled, cupping his cheek.

He had never been hit before, had never been in a fight. Charlie always considered himself a pacifist, even when he was a kid. It was Izzy who got into fights on the playground, arguing with people who tried to bully him and then eventually smoothing things over with words. Lucky for him, Charlie grew tall and soon most people simply didn’t bother him.

But this man was not scared of him. In fact, as Charlie gripped his cheek and licked the blood away from the side of his mouth, he noticed that the man was snarling, looked as though he wanted Charlie to fight so he could dish out some more.

Charlie opened his mouth to ask, Why am I here? but before he could form words, the man’s arm shot out and-whack-he once again bashed Charlie’s face with the back of his hand.

The man winced this time, squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his hand, but his face cleared quickly. “That’s for your sister, Isabel,” the man said. “And I got lots more of that.”

Charlie said nothing, which made the man sneer.

“I’ll be back with your phone, kid,” he said, “and then you and me…” The guy pointed at Charlie, then at himself. “We’re going to write some messages. Maybe a text, maybe an e-mail.”

The man turned and left the room. Charlie could hear the door being bolted from the outside.

He licked the inside of his mouth again. The blood streamed in earnest now. There was nothing in the room to stop it. There was nothing he could do to stop any of this.

There he was. There he was.

Seeing him was like stepping into some altered universe. I was eight years old and thirty at the same time. I was in Italy and also in Michigan on the lawn behind our house when my mother told us he was dead.

It was one thing to wonder if he was alive, it was yet another to have him truly standing in front of me. My father. After all these years.

“It’s…It’s…It’s.” I stopped. People always say I was at a loss for words. I had never understood that so well-so very, very well-until now. Finally I managed, “You. It’s you.”

Sometimes it’s tough to see your friends and family age. It’s surreal, though, to have someone immortalized, eternalized, forever in a certain body, a certain form and face, and then to see them twenty-two years older. It wasn’t that he looked so terrible, but it was bizarre, like watching a flower bloom or a canyon form on fast-forward at high speed.

He was a handsome man in his late fifties, his hair a salt-and-pepper gray instead of chestnut brown like Charlie’s or Elena’s. He was still trim and lean, but he seemed different than I remembered, more refined. His dark blue slacks were slimmer cut-Italian tailored, I realized. He wore a white shirt and an olive linen blazer that had breast pockets, as well as regular ones. He looked very much like a man who had lived in Italy for many years.

I looked down at his feet again. “You still wear boat shoes.”

He followed my gaze, seemed at a loss for words himself, then we both looked up, locked eyes. His eyes were like those of someone much older. They were the kind of eyes seen in photos of people who have lived through a terrible war-they were open too wide, they’d seen too much, and they were a little dead to that world that remained in front of them.

He nodded at Grandma O’s necklace around my neck. “You wear that well.”

I couldn’t stop staring at him, this man with the copper glasses and the boat shoes. Christopher. I couldn’t call him my father. I’d been calling him that in my mind forever. But now, seeing this man standing in front of me, I realized I didn’t know him. My father was the man I knew twenty-two years ago, the man I knew in my memories.

“But the body in your office…” I managed to say.

The silence in the room crackled. My skin tingled. The thoughts in my brain careened.

Christopher and Elena looked at each other. Elena started to weep. I glanced at Maggie, who was blinking madly, her mouth slightly open. Seeing Maggie, usually so bossy and full of advice, now silent made everything even more serious somehow.

I turned to Christopher and Elena. “Who was that body in your office? Was that another faked death?” My voice was loud and surprisingly angry. I hadn’t seen that emotion bubbling up.

Everyone stared at me; the air bristled around us.

“Whose…body…was…in…the…office?” My voice was demanding now, the voice I used when a witness on the stand wasn’t cooperating.