Page 53 of Crushed
“I thought—” I stammered. I looked at Cormac, then back to Rose, then back to him.
“Rose is my daughter.” He turned back to the wall of toys. “Come on out, Rose.”
The stuffed animals came crashing down as a tiny human emerged. Dressed in red skirted overalls and a long-sleeved white shirt and black leggings, she looked like she could be a model for a kid’s clothing magazine. Her hair was dark, unlike Cormac’s—she must have had her mother’s hair. But her eyes were his. She immediately hid behind her father’s back, peering around him.
“She’s shy,” Cormac explained, “She doesn’t meet many new people.” He turned over his shoulder. “It’s okay, Rose. Scarlett is nice. She’s nice, like Ms. Anderson.”
“Is she here to teach me to read?”
“No, sweetie,” he said. He pulled her from around his back in such a gentle way that it didn’t seem like the same man that I knew. He gave her a soft glance. “I wanted to introduce you to her. She’s a good friend of mine.”
With that, she slid out of his lap and took my hand, leading me towards the table. “Do you want to color?” she asked. “Ms. Anderson got me a new set of coloring pencils. They’re double-sided. Want to see?”
I was stunned. “Sure,” was all I could say.
She couldn’t have been more than five years old, but she was smart, knowing not only the basic colors of the rainbow, but the different shades from each other, like the fuschia from the hot pink from the mauve. She showed me how she wrote each letter of the alphabet, lowercaseanduppercase. Explaining the way to write each one, then began spelling simple words. Dog. Cat. Hand. Jump. Baby. Rose.
“You’re pretty,” she said. “Like Ms. Anderson.”
“Your teacher?” I asked.
“Are you a grown-up?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Ms. Anderson has wrinkles on her face like a spider’s web, but you don’t. You look like you might be Daddy’s age, but younger.”
“She hasn’t met many people in their twenties,” Cormac explained.
“How old are you?” Rose asked.
“That’s not a polite question to ask,” Cormac said. “Sometimes, people don’t want to say their ages.”
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s fine with me. I’m twenty-one,” I offered.
“You’remorethan four times my age,” she said.
“You know math too?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose playfully. “You’reold.”
I poked her shoulder. “Well, you’reyoung!”
I didn’t hang out with many five-year-olds; in fact, I never had. it had never been part of the assignments. While a few of the targets had children, I had never let an assignment take this long that they wanted me tomeettheir children. I wasn’t sure what to do, but went along with it. And Rose thought nothing of it. She was kind, smart, and silly. Then an alert on Cormac’s phone told us that Rose’s nanny was waiting to bring Rose’s dinner, so we left out the same door, changing into our old clothes and putting the other clothes into the laundry bin. Then Cormac took me to an open room at the end of a hallway, almost like a cafe, situated with a few round tables and an elaborate coffee bar. He motioned at the bar, but I shook my head. How could I stomach any coffee when I was already jittery with the information he had given me?
Cormac Stone had a daughter. A daughter he was infinitely sweet to. A daughter he cared for. A daughter that he had taught to be smart and kind.
“After Rose was born, I built this place.” He motioned around us. “I wanted a home that could provide the perfect setting for Rose, while still being separate from the rest of the city. The nursery was the top priority. Everything else was built around it.”
“And the showers,” I said, “that must be to protect her from contaminants?”
“It’s a practice some of the research laboratories have,” he said, “so I adopted it here. Why not make sure that she never gets exposed?”
Darkness crowded my chest. “Has Rose ever been out of the room?”
He shook his head. “This is the only way I can protect her.”
