Chapter 14: Winter
Winter took the house in its teeth and Mark insisted on the move.
I went to his family’s spare room with two suitcases and the portrait and a copy of the letters Ruiz allowed. The children’s remaining objects went into labeled storage with a chain-of-custody seriousness that would have been funny if it were not holy. On the first night in the new bed I woke reaching for a mattress seam that was not there. Mark’s wife left tea on the nightstand without turning on the overhead light. I drank tea. I lived.
Court dates accumulated. Gwen’s counsel argued age, argued memory, argued the cruelty of resurrecting pain. The prosecutor argued concealment, argued the traveler’s checks, argued the notebook page, argued a sister’s voice on a tape that had steered divers toward a river for two years. I attended what Patel told me to attend. I wore the suit Clara had liked. I did not speak unless asked. When asked, I said I had believed the river because I had been given nothing else to believe. The judge nodded with the professional sympathy of someone who sees old men in chairs every week. I did not mind being ordinary in that room. Ordinary meant the system was treating the case as real.
