Chapter 10: The Morning of the Presentation
I chose a Saturday. Richard had no meetings and no prepared exit. Ethan fed the baby at dawn and then carried him downstairs while I laid the documents across the dining-room table in the order that left the least room for rearrangement: the annotated timeline first, then the bank transfers, the photographs, the medical registration forms, and finally the birth certificate with Richard’s full name. The suitcase sat open on the floor beside the table like an exhibit that had already been entered into evidence. When Richard came down in search of coffee, the living room was no longer the room he had left the night before.
He stopped in the doorway. His eyes moved from Ethan to the infant to the papers and back again. For a moment the calm, respectable surface held. Then it thinned.
May you like
“What is this?”
“The reason you needed him gone by noon,” I said. “Sit down.”
