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A Novel
by Florence Knapp
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Prologue
October 1987
Cora's mother always used to say children were whipped up by the wind, that even the quiet ones would come in after playtime made wild by it. Cora feels it in herself now, that restlessness. Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy. Because tomorrow—if morning comes, if the storm stops raging—Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she'll formalize who he will become.
Cora has never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. But what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mold, hoping he'll be strong enough to find his own shape within it. Because Gordon is a name passed down through the men in her husband's family, and it seems impossible it could be any other way. But this doesn't stop her arguing back and forth with herself, considering all the times she's felt a person's name might have influenced the course of their life. Amelia Earhart. The Lumière brothers. Only last week, she'd noticed a book on her husband's bedside table, Clinical Neurology by Lord Walter Russell Brain.
"Doesn't that strike you as odd?" she'd asked.
"Coincidence," Gordon had replied. "Although you wouldn't believe the number of urologists called Burns, Cox, and Ball. And, actually, Mr. Legg is pretty common in orthopedics."
Do you not see the risk? she'd wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn't. Because surely that was the point.
She rests the crook of a bent finger against the warmth of the baby's cheek as though his skin might transmit some vital message. Of what he wants. Of who he might be. But before anything can be divined, something crashes against the back wall of the house—a sound both heard and felt. She draws the baby closer as the security light flickers on outside, illuminating the roiling silhouettes of the firs. Vast and looming, then receding, before being made large again. She hears Gordon emerge from the next room and belt down the stairs, pictures him striding pajamaed across the dark of the living room toward the patio doors, then standing in the spotlight, squinting without his contact lenses, trying to determine what's out of place. She imagines him reduced by the looming threat of the trees, the immensity of the storm.
A few minutes later he opens the door to the nursery, and Cora feels a draft of cold air, as though it's attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs. "It was just the watering can," he says. "Come back to bed now."
* * *
Trees lean at odd angles. Flattened fence panels leave gaping invitations into back gardens. A rotary washing line lies collapsed across the pavement. A few doors up, a man's shirt is caught on a privet hedge, pegs still pinched at its shoulders. Maia's eyes flit about, their town suddenly a spot-the-difference puzzle.
They walk along the edge of the common, steering the pram around fallen branches, stopping to look at an oak's vast, wormy rootball, dripping with clods of mud. Maia crouches in the hollow beneath. "Careful not to get your coat dirty," Cora says. His words. Her own instinct is to encourage Maia to lie down, to breathe in the rich, musky scent of the earth, to imagine herself as a fox cub curled up nose to tail. She's nine, on the cusp of being too old to want to do these things.
Maia clambers out and dusts off her coat. At the zebra crossing, where the amber globe of a Belisha beacon lies decapitated beside the road, they wait for the cars to stop. Maia looks toward the pram and says, "Why don't I have your name, if he'll have Dad's?"
Excerpted from The Names by Florence Knapp. Copyright © 2025 by Florence Knapp. Excerpted by permission of Pamela Dorman Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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