Chapter 9 #2
"No. Not tonight." Her voice did not move at all.
"You can fire me on Thursday and any lawyer in this state will take that instruction from you and be delighted, and if you tell me the same thing on Thursday I will file it myself before lunch.
But I am not putting a woman's private notebooks into a public file ninety minutes after she got a phone call, and if you think about it for one minute you will know that's why you hired me.
" A pause. "Go and look at your son. Call me Thursday. "
The rest of it Erin got in pieces over four days, and none of it from Graham, because she did not answer him again.
Wednesday: Blair Chadwick was photographed at a dinner in Camden at a table that included two Lockwoods, and told a columnist, who asked her about none of it, that she had known the family for a very long time and that everybody just wanted what was best for the little boy.
That was all she said. Twenty-two words. Nothing in it you could point at.
Erin read it at six in the morning and had to sit down on the stairs.
She read it eight or nine times, which is what you do, and each time it got smaller and worse.
What's best for the little boy. Not the boy.
Not Wyatt, which she would not have dared.
The little boy — a phrase that puts a woman in a room she has never been in, holding a child she has never met, being sensible about him.
It matched the motion so precisely in temperature that Erin sat on her own staircase and understood that they were the same document, written in two hands, and that whether or not the two women had spoken did not matter in the slightest, because they did not need to.
They had been in the same rooms for twenty years. They knew the tune.
And what Erin could not stop looking at was the seating.
Because there was a table in Camden on a Wednesday in April, seven months after Erin had walked out of that family with her son on her hip, and Blair Chadwick was at it, next to two Lockwoods, being photographed.
Still on the list. After everything — the trust, the instruction letter, the disclosure, the hospital, the man in the plastic chair with his coat over him. Nobody in that family had taken her off a single list. Not one person had picked up a phone.
It's not what he signs. It's what he burns.
He hadn't burned anything. Seven months and he hadn't burned one thing, and here was the proof of it in a photograph, at a table, with a caption.
Erin sat on the stairs in her coat until Owen unlocked the shop underneath her at ten past seven and she had to go back up so he wouldn't find her there.
Wednesday, later: Wyatt.
He had eight days of school left before the summer and he was not allowed to run yet, and he came out at three with his stitches taped and his book bag dragging and got into the car and said:
"Are we still going to Dad's on Saturday?"
Erin had the mirror. She made herself use it properly.
"I don't know yet, bud."
"You said you'd tell me as soon as you knew." He was not accusing her. He was quoting her, which was worse. "You said it was a promise."
"I did say that."
"So."
"So here's where I am." She turned around in the seat, because she was not going to do this to the back of his head.
"Some grown-ups are having an argument about where you should live.
It's not about you and it isn't because of anything you did.
It's a stupid argument and it's got lawyers in it, and while it's happening I'm being careful, and being careful means I don't know about Saturday yet. "
Wyatt absorbed this.
"Is Dad in the argument?"
And there it was. Five years old, straight down the middle, no run-up.
Erin had about a second and a half.
She could say yes. It was true — it was in his name, on his side, out of his family. It would be the accurate entry, the ledger entry, facts only, no adjectives.
"Yes," she said. "But he's on your side of it. He's just — he's being slow about it."
"Why?"
"Because he's frightened of somebody."
Wyatt frowned at that in a way that made him look startlingly like his father.
"Dad's not frightened of anyone."
"Everybody's frightened of somebody," Erin said. "Put your belt on."
She drove home. She got him upstairs and got the tape checked and got him fed, and at about eight, standing at the sink, she understood what she had just done, and had to put the plate down.
He's on your side of it.
She had defended him. To their son. On the worst day, with the motion open on her table, four days after the hand in the corridor, she had gotten to the fork and gone the other way — not for Graham, who would never know she'd done it.
For a five-year-old with stitches, so that the boy would not have to carry his father around as a villain for the rest of his childhood.
That was the exact thing Adelaide Lockwood had done for fifty-one years. Manage the room. Absorb it. Make the family look better than it was, in private, at her own cost, because the alternative was a scene.
Erin stood at her own sink in her own apartment and thought: there it is. Seven months out, and it took five days.
She did not write it in the ledger.
Thursday: Colleen called and said Rennick's office had gone silent in a way she found interesting.
Friday: nothing.
Friday night Shannon came and sat on the floor of Erin's kitchen with her back against the cabinet, because Erin was already there, and did not say a single word about Graham Lockwood for four hours, which was the greatest act of friendship of Shannon Gallagher's life.
At about midnight Erin said, "I let him into that room."
"Yeah."
"I called him. Nobody made me. I picked up the phone and I called him and I said he's your son, and I held his hand in a corridor for ten seconds, and five days later my kid's name is in a court file."
"Yeah," Shannon said.
"It's not that he did it."
"I know it's not."
"It's that I opened the door." Erin looked at the ceiling.
"Seven months. Seven months of not answering, not going, not taking the car, not taking the money, and I was fine.
I was so fine, Shannon, I was — I was going to the harbor.
And then a nurse said something about taking turns and I didn't correct her, and I let him hold my hand, and I thought — "
She stopped.
"You thought maybe," Shannon said.
"I thought maybe."
"Yeah."
Erin put her head back against the cabinet door.
"I'm not going to do that again," she said.
On Saturday morning she did the thing she had refused to do in September, on principle, because it would have been a message.
She sat at the table with her coffee and blocked his number.
It took four seconds. There was a small satisfying animation.
And Erin Brooks sat in the quiet with a cold cup in front of her and understood that she had just handed him the one thing he had never once had in six years, which was permission to stop trying — and that some part of her, in a place she was not going to look at directly for a long time, had done it precisely to find out whether he would.