270.🎂 THE BIRTHDAY LIE THAT STOLE HIS MOTHER

Chapter 06 - The Mother He Remembered

He carried Katherine's diary page home in his coat pocket, folded so often that by morning its corners were soft. He had never been a man who kept letters. Carlo burned them; Katherine saved them in drawers with old batteries and birthday candles. Alexander was discovering which habit he wished he'd inherited.

Frances met him at nine with a list of documents she had requested through proper channels. An independent auditor would review the legacy account. She had also contacted counsel for the old dockworkers' fund, making clear that Alexander was investigating without claiming any conclusion yet. He didn't like the slow pace. She told him that speed was the enemy of proof.

"My name is on the missing-money reports," he said.

"Your name is on several things you weren't old enough to authorize. We'll separate those from things you signed as an adult. You may not enjoy the distinction."

She was right. In 2017, after Katherine had started treatment, Alexander had approved a restructuring that reduced payouts on certain disputed retirement claims. Carlo said it was a housekeeping issue. Alexander hadn't asked who would go without. Frances now showed him the names of twelve former dockworkers whose appeals remained unresolved.

"We can reopen them," he said.

"Yes. But first you have to admit that you closed them."

The sentence followed him north to Hastings that afternoon. Sofia met him in her shop and took one look at his face before putting the CLOSED sign in the window. She made coffee and said nothing as he laid the report on her cutting table.

"I signed this," he said. "Four years before my father died."

"I can see that."

"People lost money. I told myself I was saving the business."

She put on her glasses and read the first page. She didn't say that everyone made mistakes. She didn't offer him the sort of absolution a man like him could buy from almost anyone.

"What will you do now?" she asked.

"Frances says we can reopen the claims. We'll make the families whole where we can."

"Then begin there."

Alexander looked around the room. On the wall hung a child's drawing of a green house and a crooked sun. It bore no name. He wondered whose children had come here while he was growing up with a woman who was not allowed to say his name.

"Did you have a family after me?" he asked.

Sofia folded her glasses. "I almost married a man named Peter. He was good to me. He wanted children. I couldn't bear the thought of pretending I didn't already have one. That wasn't fair to him. He married somebody else. They send me a Christmas card every year."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize for being born. I did enough of that for both of us."

He smiled despite himself. Sofia had a habit of speaking without softening the corners of a sentence. Katherine had done the opposite, coating even bad news in so much sweetness that sometimes he hadn't understood how serious it was.

At lunch they ate tomato sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Sofia showed him how to keep the bread from going soggy. He nearly asked if he'd liked tomatoes as a baby and stopped, embarrassed by the hunger beneath the question. She answered anyway.

"You hated mashed peas. You liked pears. Once you cried for forty minutes because you dropped a wooden spoon."

"I still dislike peas."

"That's reassuring. At least something survived."

She showed him a dent in the old table where a boy from the neighborhood had dropped an iron years earlier. His mother, it turned out, had been the person children visited after school to have costumes repaired or have a ribbon sewn back onto a stuffed animal. He had grown up in houses full of paintings nobody was allowed to touch. She had spent those same years mending things meant to be loved hard.

Afterward she brought out a box of photographs. There were only nine of him as a baby. She explained that Carlo sent back the cameras whenever she tried to take pictures. One photograph showed Katherine holding him in a garden, her expression unguarded. It had been taken by Sofia herself years later, at a distance. Alexander realized that the women had found ways of knowing one another while the man who made them enemies believed he was the only person making decisions.

"Did you forgive her?" he asked.

"Some days. Other days I resented her for the simple things she got to do. Buying your shoes. Knowing when you were sick. Going into your room without permission. Then she'd come here and tell me something ordinary about you. I knew she was trying."

Sofia reached for a faded envelope. "When Katherine was ill, she asked me to visit her. It was the first time she'd let me sit beside her bed. She asked whether I hated her. I said yes, for a long time. Then I told her the truth: I was grateful she hadn't let Carlo turn you into him."

Alexander pressed his fingers to his forehead. "She thought I had already become him."

"No. She was afraid you could, which is different."

Sofia told him that Katherine had kept a second set of business papers in a deposit box. She intended to use them to expose a pension scheme after Carlo's death. She died before she could do it. Sofia and Margaret had been unable to find the box's key, and Katherine's lawyer claimed no box existed.

"Who was her lawyer?" Alexander asked.

Sofia named a partner at a firm Julian had employed until recently. A thread tightened inside him. He called Frances from the shop. She asked him not to confront the lawyer and promised to check the probate inventory.

Later, while Sofia packed away the photos, Alexander saw a narrow gold band on a chain around her neck. It had been polished smooth on one side and worn thin on the other.

"Is that his?" he asked.

"My wedding ring. I stopped wearing it on my hand in 1994. I kept it because for a while I was happy. I didn't want him to own those months as well."

He understood then that the truth would not make his father entirely monstrous or entirely human. It would leave him as he had been: a man who could give a woman a beautiful summer and ruin most of the years that followed. Alexander was tired of people asking him to pick only one version.

His phone rang just as Sofia was locking the drawer. Frances sounded unlike herself. She had found a reference to Katherine's box in the probate files, under a different beneficiary's name.

"Your mother never listed you as the person allowed to open it," Frances said.