Bart had not thought about Dylan in the way Edward meant - strategically, as a reason to do something. He thought about Dylan in the way he thought about all things that complicated him: carefully, from a distance, with a precision that kept the feeling of it from reaching the parts of him that would be affected by it.
Dylan was three. Dylan lived in Macon, Kansas, with his mother, in a two-bedroom apartment that Bart had never visited. He paid the child support with the precision and regularity of a direct deposit, not because anyone had required him to or because he was performing compliance, but because it was a financial obligation and Bart honored his financial obligations as a matter of character. He knew Dylan's birthday - March 14th, which was memorable if you had any affection for pi. He knew he was healthy, that he was developing normally, that Zoe sent photographs twice a year on a schedule that was clearly not spontaneous but that Bart suspected Zoe maintained as a form of courtesy rather than warmth, a way of acknowledging that the child had two parents without having to feel warmly about one of them.
He had looked at those photographs. He had looked at them the way he looked at most things: carefully, registering what was there. A small person with his eyes - not just the color but the set of them, the slight downward outer angle that his mother had always said made him look like he was always slightly disappointed with whatever he was looking at, which he had never found to be an accurate characterization though he understood the impression - and Zoe's coloring and Zoe's patience in the way the small person held himself, the particular quality of someone who was comfortable waiting.
He had looked at the photographs and filed them in the specific place where he filed things that were real and important and that he nonetheless could not do anything useful with, and he had continued with his day.
Bart knew this about himself. He knew it was not an admirable quality. He had chosen to know it rather than to do anything about it, which was its own kind of honesty.
"She won't come," he said.
"She might. If the argument is framed correctly."
"She hated me when we divorced. She probably still hates me." He breathed carefully. "She's a rational woman. She has very good reasons for any position she's arrived at about me."
"I'm not going to argue the case to her on emotional grounds," Edward said. "I'm going to argue it on Dylan's grounds. Which are the grounds she can't dismiss, because that's who she is."
Bart looked at him. "You're going to use my son as leverage to get his mother to come and take care of me."
"I'm going to point out that Dylan has a father who would like to know him, and that this is a window. The rest is framing." Edward's voice was perfectly even, the voice of a man who had made peace, at some point in his career, with the gap between what was ideal and what was necessary. "I'm also going to tell her, partially, what's happening. Not everything. Not about Charles, not about the investigation. But that you were in an accident - a car accident - and that you need care, and that there's a complication that makes professional nursing inadvisable."
"What's the complication."
"Temporary amnesia."
Bart stared at him.
"The story I'm going to tell Zoe," Edward said, meeting his gaze without flinching, "is that you were in a car accident and that as a result you have a temporary amnesia affecting your recent memory. Situational, trauma-related, expected to resolve within a few months. She'll believe she's coming to care for a man who doesn't remember her, doesn't remember the marriage, doesn't remember anything of consequence from the last several years." He paused. "The reality, of course, is that you remember everything perfectly."
The room was quiet. Somewhere down the hall, someone's monitoring equipment issued a steady soft alarm - three ascending tones - and then fell silent again.
"You're asking me to pretend I don't know her," Bart said.
"I'm asking you to perform not-knowing while you recover, in order to give us time to let the police do their work and get you to a point of physical safety." Edward held his gaze. "I understand this is a significant deception. I'm asking you to consider whether the alternative - remaining visible, remaining a target, trying to manage your own security in a hospital with rotating staff while someone who has already tried once to kill you is still at large - is preferable."
The room held its quiet. Outside the angled blinds, the New Jersey afternoon was doing the particular thing that November afternoons in New Jersey did, which was to become dark earlier than anyone was quite ready for. The amber bar of light across the middle of the blinds had gone to a cooler grey.
Bart breathed, carefully. Let the pain settle at its regular level. Thought about Charles, somewhere in the country, fled and wanted, with a police warrant and whatever was driving him to wherever he'd gone. Thought about the alley in Hoboken and the sound of that gunshot - the flat terrible crack of it, and then the sidewalk, and then nothing until this room.
Thought about eight weeks of a farmhouse in New Jersey, of Zoe's careful eyes on him every day, of performing not-knowing while knowing everything. Of sitting across from the woman he had been married to for five years and looking at her with the blank polite attention of a man who had been introduced to a stranger, and doing this every morning over breakfast and every evening and every time she changed his bandages, for eight weeks.
He thought about Dylan, who was three years old and had his eyes and who lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Macon, Kansas and whose life Bart occupied only as an absence.
"She'll know," he said. "She's not easy to fool. She never was."
"I'm not trying to fool her indefinitely. I'm trying to buy us eight weeks. Long enough to get you mobile, long enough for law enforcement to close the gaps, long enough to get you to a point where being discovered isn't a death risk." Edward stood. "Will you let me call her?"
"Yes," Bart said.