The Silent Girl

their marriage.
    “Charlotte was your only child?” Jane asked.
    “Dina insisted that we have only one. At the time, I was fine with it. But now …”
    Now he regrets it, she thought. Regrets pouring all his love and hopes into a child he would one day lose. She turned the pages and studied other photos of Charlotte as a blue-eyed, golden-haired toddler. Occasionally Dina appeared, but Patrick was in none of the photos, except as an elusive shadow cast at the edge of the frame while he held the camera. Jane turned to the final page in the album, the year Charlotte turned four years old.
    Patrick handed her the next volume.
    The years seemed to accelerate in this second album, the girl growing, changing every few pages. After the flurry of attention devoted to a child’s first years, after the novelty of new parenthood wears off, taking photos becomes an afterthought, the camera brought out only when the special occasion calls for it. A fifth-birthday party. A first ballet recital. A visit to New York City. Suddenly that cherubic toddler transformed into a glum-faced adolescent, posing in her school uniform at the front gate of the Bolton Academy.
    “She was twelve years old in this photo,” said Patrick. “I remember she hated that uniform. Said that plaid makes a girl look fat, and that was why the school made them wear it. To make the girls look so ugly, they wouldn’t get into trouble with any of the boys.”
    “Did she not want to go to Bolton?”
    “Oh, she certainly did want to go. But I admit, I wasn’t happy about seeing her leave. I had such a hard time losing my little girl to boarding school. Dina insisted because it was the school that she graduated from, a place where a girl could
meet all the right people
. That was how Dina put it.” He paused. “God, that probably sounds so superficial, but Dina was completely focused on things like that.On Charlotte making the right friends and marrying the right man.” He paused and added, ironically, “As it turned out, it was Dina who met a husband at Bolton.”
    “That must have been hard for you when Dina left.”
    Patrick gave a resigned shrug. “I accepted it. What else could I do? And oddly enough, I rather liked Arthur Mallory. Liked the whole Mallory family, in fact—Barbara, their son. Mark. All of them were decent people. But hormones are an irresistible force. I think I lost my wife to Arthur the very first time they laid eyes on each other. All I could do was stand by and watch my marriage fall apart.”
    Jane turned to the last page and studied the final image in the album. It was a wedding photo, and standing at the center were the new bride and groom, Dina and Arthur Mallory, both dressed in formal attire. Flanking them were their respective children, Mark standing at his father’s side, Charlotte at her mother’s. While bride and groom were beaming, Charlotte looked dazed, as if she did not know how she’d come to be standing with these people.
    “How old is Charlotte in this photo?” Jane asked.
    “She would have been thirteen there.”
    “She looks a little lost.”
    “It happened so fast, I think we were all stunned. We’d met the Mallorys only a year before, when Charlotte and Mark both performed at the Bolton Academy Christmas pageant. A year later, all of us once again attended the Bolton Christmas pageant, but by then Dina had left me for Arthur. And I was just another single father, raising a daughter on my own.”
    “Charlotte stayed with you after the divorce?”
    “Dina and I discussed it, and we both felt it was best if I had custody so that Charlotte could stay in the house where she’d grown up. Every few months, Charlotte was supposed to spend a weekend with Dina and Arthur, but they traveled so much they were seldom home.”
    “And there was no legal battle, no tug-of-war over your daughter?”
    “Just because two people get divorced doesn’t mean they don’t care about each other. We did care. And we were now all part of an extended family. Arthur’s ex-wife, Barbara, had some difficulty accepting the divorce, I’m afraid, and she remained bitter to the end. But I saw no point in hanging on to resentments. It’s called being civilized.”
    That was what Ingersoll had written in his report, that Patrick Dion and his ex-wife had stayed cordial even after the divorce. Now, hearing it from Patrick himself, she could believe it.
    “They even spent their last Christmas here, with me,” he said.