"El, I'm entitled to be happy."

"I didn't say you weren't."

"You're acting it."

"Dad, please."

"I don't like to be alone and I'm not getting any younger."

Silence fell between them, and Ellen made no move to fill it. The ugliest of thoughts popped into her head, the wrong one had died. She felt ashamed of the very notion, and confused. She loved her father.

"I guess I knew you'd get upset. You and your mother were two of a kind. Peas in a pod."

Ellen couldn't speak for a moment. Her mother had been her best friend in the world. That said it all.

"Life goes on."

Ellen felt the knot again, then flipped her thinking. "So when's the wedding? I need to get a dress and all."

"Uh, it's in Italy."

"Italy? Why?"

"Barbara likes it there, near Positano." Her father cut his sandwich and took a bite, leaving Ellen to fill in the blanks.

"Am I going? Is Will?"

"Sorry, but no." Her father looked back at her over his sandwich. "It's not a big deal, not at our age. We're just doing it, no muss, no fuss. We're getting on a plane end of the week."

"Wow, that soon?"

"I told her you'd be fine with it. Her kid's fine with it."

"I understand." Ellen tried to shrug it off. "I'm officially fine with it."

"She has a daughter, too. Year older than you. Abigail."

"I thought she had a boy in the Peace Corps."

"That was Janet."

"Oh." Ellen smiled. It was kind of funny. "Well, good. I always wanted a sister. Can I have a pony, too?"

At that, he smiled, chewing.

"What does she do, my new sister?"

"Lawyer in D.C."

"I always wanted a lawyer, too." Ellen laughed, and so did he, setting down his sandwich.

"Ha! That's enough, wise guy."

"I think it's good, I really do." Ellen felt better saying it, and her chest knot loosened just a bit. "Be happy, Dad."

"I love you, kitten."

"I love you, too." Ellen managed a smile.

"You gonna eat or what?"

"No, I'm waiting for the wedding cake."

He rolled his eyes.

"So tell me what she looks like."

"Here, I'll show you." Her father leaned over, slid a brown wallet from his back pocket, and opened it up. He flipped past the second plastic envelope, which had an old photo of Will, and the third, he turned sideways and set down on the table. "That's Barbara."

Ellen eyed the woman, who was attractive, with her hair in a short, classy cut. "Mommy!"

"Gimme that." Her father smiled and took the wallet back.

"She looks nice. Is she nice?"

"Of course she's nice." He leaned over to put the wallet into his back pocket. "What do you think? She's a jerk, that's why I'm marrying her?"

"Are you going to move in with her, or is she moving in here?"

"I'm selling the house and moving in with her. She's got a corner unit with a deck."

"You gold digger, you."

He smiled again, then leaned back in his chair, regarding her for a moment. "You know, you gotta move on, kid."

Ellen felt the knot again. Time to change the subject. "I interviewed this woman whose husband kidnapped her children. Susan Sulaman, if you remember the story I did."

He shook his head, no, and Ellen let it go. Her mother would have remembered the story. She'd kept scrapbooks of Ellen's clippings, starting with the college newspaper and ending three weeks before she died.

"Anyway, Susan thinks there's an instinct that mothers have about their children."

"Your mother had that in spades." Her father beamed. "Look how good you turned out, all because of her."

"Hold on, let me show you something." Ellen got up, opened her purse, and extracted the photo of Timothy Braverman as a baby, then handed it to her father. "How cute is this baby?"

"Cute."

"Do you know who he is?"

"What am I, stupid? It's W."

Ellen stood over him as if suspended, not knowing whether to tell him. He and Sarah had both mistaken Timothy for W. She felt funny about it, and not good funny. It made her uncomfortable. She realized now why she was missing her mother so much. She could have told her mother about Timothy Braverman. Her mother would have known what to do.

"He's grown up a lot since then, hasn't he?" her father asked, holding up the photo with unmistakable pride.

"How so? I mean, what differences do you see?"

"The forehead." He circled the area with an index finger knotted from arthritis. "His forehead got a lot bigger, and his cheeks, they're full now." He handed her back the photo. "He just grew into his face."

"He sure did." Ellen lied more easily than she thought, for a bad liar. She folded the paper, put it back inside her purse, and sat down, but her father was looking reflective, pouring them a glass of tea.

"You were like that, too, just like that. When you were little, your face was so wide. I used to say you looked like a salad plate. Will's the same way. He gets it from you."

"Dad, he's adopted, remember?"

"Oh, right." Her father laughed. "You're such a good mother, I always think you're his real mother."

Ellen let that go, too. She usually felt like Will's real mother, until someone told her she wasn't. But she knew what he meant.

"You got that mother instinct from your mother. You're every inch her daughter. That he's adopted, it doesn't matter. That's why we keep forgetting. It's like proof."

"Maybe you're right." Ellen nodded, oddly grateful.

But then again, Don Gleeson could sell anybody anything.

Ellen finally got home and closed the front door behind her. "How is he?" she asked Connie, keeping her voice low.

"Hanging in. I gave him Tylenol at two." Connie checked her watch. "He's been asleep since four."

"Did he eat?" Ellen shed her coat and hung it in the closet as Connie reached for hers, the domestic changing of the guard.

"Chicken soup and crackers. Flat ginger ale. We took it easy today. All he wanted to do was stay in bed." Connie slipped into her coat. "I read to him after lunch until he got sleepy."

"Thanks so much."

"Don't know how much he heard of it, though. He was just lying there." Connie zipped up her coat and picked up her tote bag, which was already packed.

"Poor thing."

"Give him a kiss for me." Connie got her purse, and Ellen opened the door, said her good-byes, then shut the door and locked it, preoccupied. If Will had just gone to sleep, she had a window of time to do something that had been bugging her on the ride home. She kicked off her boots and hurried upstairs.

Half an hour later, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, bent over her task. A blown-glass lamp cast an ellipse of light on two photos of Timothy Braverman, the age-progressed picture from the white card and the computer printout of his baby photo from ACMAC.com. Next to those were a pile of ten photos of Will, chosen because they showed his features the best. Oreo Figaro sat beside her like the Sphinx, keeping his own counsel.

Ellen arranged Will's photos in two rows of five, in chronological order. The top row was a younger Will, the first year she had him, at age one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half. The bottom row was the second year she'd had him, ages two-and-a-half to present. She looked at them all, examining his face over time, from its thinnest and least healthy to a beaming little boy. It was like watching a sunflower open and thrive, turning to the sun.

She returned to the top row of photos and picked the youngest one that was the most representative of Will's features. It showed him at about one-and-a-half years old, in a flannel shirt and overalls, sitting next to an over-sized pumpkin at Halloween. Suddenly, Susan Sula-man broke through Ellen's consciousness.

It was October, a week before Halloween. Lynnie was going as a fish.