She heard Adam come up behind her. She did not turn the monitor away. She had thought, for eighteen years, that if this moment ever came she would fight it with everything she had, would lie and keep lying, would scream if she had to. Instead she felt only a terrible tiredness, as if she had been carrying something heavy up a staircase for so long that she had forgotten it was not part of her body.
Adam looked at the screen. She watched him look. She watched his eyes go to the girl's face and stay there, searching, and she saw the moment he recognized her, saw it reach him from a long way off. Then his eyes went down to the white bundle. Then to the woman. Then to the man.
"That's you," he said.
"Yes."
"Who is that?"
She knew he meant the man. She knew, from the way his voice had caught on the word, what he had braced himself for: an old lover, a first husband, some ghost in a corduroy jacket with a claim on her. She almost wished it were that simple.
"His name is Martin Hollis," she said. "And that's his wife, Ruth."