Chapter 4

I waited. That was the last thing I did the way he asked.

Grant came home at eight and poured two fingers of bourbon he did not drink and stood at the window with his back to me, which is what men do when they want the lake to have a conversation on their behalf.

"Where did you find it?" he said.

"A relinquishment form at St. Auren's. Hattie Pruitt's signature. Verena's initials in the arranging-party box."

He closed his eyes. Not the way a man closes his eyes in prayer. The way a man closes his eyes when the elevator doors open on the floor he's been dreading.

"Grant." I set the cedar box on the counter between us and opened it. "Miles's anklet. Chart 4412." I laid my phone beside it, the photograph open: the tarnished band, 4413, in a fourteen-year-old's hand. "Consecutive numbers. Two live births on the delivery record. A stillbirth certificate signed by Dr. Cole, who just told me he heard my son cry."

"Nadia-"

"Say it."

"I only signed." He turned. His handsome, reasonable, tired face was wet. "The funeral home paperwork, the death certificate was Cole's, but there was a form you needed a parent for, and Mother said you were in no condition, and I signed it. That's all I did. I signed a page."

"That's all." I heard my own voice go flat and cold, the way it does when I'm about to take a witness apart. "You signed away my son. You watched me put a box in a closet and grieve for him every December eighth. You let me think I buried a child while you were eating dinner across the table from his brother."

"I didn't know where he went."

"You introduced me to the woman who did." I was shaking. "You brought Verena to the hospital. You have known the entire time."

"It wasn't my-" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "The trust. Theodore's trust. There's a clause. One heir, Nadia. Principal passes intact to a single male heir. If there are two, the trustees have discretion to divide or force a sale of the holding company. Verena believed - she believed a split would end the name. Everything my father built."

"Everything your father built," I repeated. "So she buried one of my sons in a filing cabinet."

"She kept him alive. She didn't-" He caught the sentence and hated where it was going. "She found the nurse through the family physician. She paid her. She kept him alive."

"He is homeless," I said. "He slept on the Orange Line this winter. That is what your mother's kind of alive means."

Grant sat down on a barstool like his legs had failed. "I will fix it," he said. "Privately. There's money set aside. We can place him somewhere quiet, get him school, get him - Nadia, we can do this without destroying the family."

"There is no family," I said. "There's a holding company and a lie with your ring on it."

He looked at me then and I watched him choose, the way I watch a witness choose between two bad answers. He chose the family, the way he always had.

"You're upset," he said. "You're not thinking about Miles."

"Don't." I picked up the box. "Don't put Miles in this. I know exactly what I'm thinking about."

I did not sleep in that bed again. I took the guest room, and at three in the morning I sat in the dark with my laptop and the anklet box and I started, for the first time in my life, a case against my own house.

I called the one person who could not refuse me.

"Verena," I said, when she answered on the second ring at three-forty in the morning, awake and unsurprised. "I want to see you. Tomorrow. Wherever you are. And I'm bringing the anklet."

"Come to Lake Forest," my mother-in-law said, in the same voice she used to ask me to pass the salt. "We'll have tea."