Chapter 3

We put Josie to bed at eight. Cori read her two books and I stood in the hall and listened to my daughter's voice going on about the girl's raincoat, the girl's thermos, the girl's blanket, the girl's name, which was Bryn, which is a name I have not heard said out loud in sixteen years.

I was on my third cup of coffee when Cori came back down and sat across from me. She didn't sit the way she usually sits, knee up, phone in hand. She sat like a woman at a closing.

"Talk," she said.

"About what."

She just waited. Cori can wait longer than anybody I've ever met, except my mother.

"Bryn is Dean's daughter," I said.

That wasn't the thing I meant to say. I meant to say it's a kid playing in a building, it's nothing, and what came out instead was the truth, and once it was out it sat there on the table like a dropped dish.

Cori's face didn't move for a second. Then it did, all at once, the way flour goes when you knock the bag over - everything at once, pale, and it stays on the counter and the floor and the front of your shirt.

"Dean," she said.

"Wren Delacroix had a baby. She's eight. Wren's in Reno. She dropped her off in June, that's all I know."

"That's all you know."

"That's all I know."

Josie appeared in the doorway in her pajamas, one sock on, holding the empty water cup.

"Mama, she said she's eight too. She said we're the same age for four months." Josie yawned enormously. "She said her blanket has buttons on it."

"Bug," Cori said, gentle. "Did she tell you anything else to tell us?"

Josie thought. "She said to say it when Daddy was in the room."

The rain rattled the window. Cori got up and walked our daughter back up the stairs, and I heard the toilet flush and the water run and the low murmur of Cori's voice, and then her feet coming back down one at a time, slow, like she was deciding something on each step.

She sat down again. She put both hands flat on the table.

"I have to tell you something," she said.

"Okay."

"I'm the one who told them."

I knew. I have known for sixteen years. But she had never once said it out loud in this kitchen, and hearing her say it made me feel like the floor had dropped an inch.

"I was twenty," she said. "I was doing the auction desk for your dad that summer because Ruth's hip was bad. I counted the settle-up that Saturday and I put it in the safe and I locked it and I gave your father the key and I went home and I slept like a baby." She stopped. "Sunday morning everybody's standing in the office yelling. And your dad turned around and asked me, straight out, in front of everybody, Cori, you were the last one here last night. Did you see anybody?"

"You saw the truck," I said.

"I saw the truck in the alley and I saw a man in the office window in a dark jacket, and it was ten o'clock at night and it was raining and the window was that old blurry glass that looks like ice." Her voice stayed level and her hands did not. "And I knew Dean drove the truck and it was Dean's week to lock up. So I said it looked like Dean." She looked at me. "I said it looked like Dean, Nathan. And your father nodded at me like I'd handed him something, and he said all right, and that was it. That was the whole trial."

"He used you," I said.

"He didn't have to work very hard."

"Because you were twenty and it was raining and you couldn't see."

"Nate." She tilted her head. "Don't."

I shut up.

For a minute there was nothing in the kitchen but rain. Then Cori leaned back and folded her arms and looked at me the way she looks at a bottle with the label turned away.

"There's one thing I don't understand," she said. "You're sitting here telling me all this like a man reading it off a page. You didn't ask me one question. You didn't ask me what he looked like or what time it was or whether I was sure."

"Cori-"

"You knew her name, Nate. You knew the mother's name and the baby's name and the year she was born, and you said that's all I know with your eyes on the table. And out in that alley you were gone eleven minutes to check a van that's parked right there." She pointed at the window without turning her head. "Nate - did you see something that night?"

The rain. The pendant light. My wife's face, two feet away, and she has never once lied to me in twelve years, and I have never once told her the truth.

"No," I said, to her face, out loud.

She nodded slowly, like she was filing it.