Chapter 7

The war started on a Monday, quietly, the way rich wars do.

At nine, a messenger brought a cease-and-desist to my office - from the firm that had represented the Ellerys for forty years - alleging that I had "coerced a minor into contact" and "fabricated evidence to support an adverse claim against the Ellery Family Trust." It demanded that I surrender all hospital records, all photographs, and the memory box, and it was signed by a name I had once called at Christmastime.

At ten, my managing partner, Rosalind Vance, closed my office door and sat down across from me with the face she uses for settlements she doesn't like.

"The Ellerys are a client of this firm," she said. "Not your matter, but a client. And there's now a demand letter with your name on it. Tell me you have something more than a hunch and a baby bracelet."

"I have a relinquishment form signed by a nurse and initialed by Verena, a two-live-births delivery record against a stillbirth certificate, a physician who will say he heard the infant cry, and a living witness."

"Irma?" She meant my memory box. "Nadia, that's a deposition, not a case. Who's the witness?"

"A woman named Loretta Pruitt who raised him for six years and kept receipts."

Rosalind was quiet. "Then you need to get to her before the Ellerys do."

She reached across the desk and closed a folder that had my name on it, and I understood that she had just made a choice about her own practice, and that I owed her for it later.

At two, the family made an offer, and they made it not to me but to Eli, which was either a blunder or the coldest move on the board.

A driver found him at the warming center and left an envelope: a bank card in his name with a balance printed on the letterhead, a furnished studio apartment for four years prepaid, a school placement, a monthly stipend until he was twenty-five. All of it real. All of it legal. And one line at the bottom, in Verena's hand: Your mother never wanted you. This is what a family can offer. Take it and there is no case to make.

Eli brought the envelope to me at the office and laid it on my desk like contraband.

"Why does it say 'your mother never wanted you'?" he asked.

"She's trying to make you need her offer," I said. "It's a lie. I wanted you, and I didn't know you existed, and I know how that sounds."

He looked at the bank card for a long moment. Then he took his tarnished anklet off its cord and set it on top of the envelope, and he pushed the whole thing back across the desk to me the way he'd pushed the bright one beside the tarnished one at that first table.

"Keep it," he said. "I want the other thing instead."

"What other thing?"

"The auditorium," Eli said. "The one with everybody in it."

He meant the trust review. He had heard me on the phone. He had done the arithmetic of his own life and decided that a card with a number on it was worth less than a room full of people who would have to say his name out loud.

That night I filed the guardianship petition, knowing it would be contested immediately. Three days later, the Ellerys answered it - and in their answer, buried on page fourteen, they asked the court to investigate my fitness, citing a sealed juvenile matter from my own adolescence that no one in my current life was supposed to know, and that Verena, who had read my file at the family's own firm before I married her son, had clearly kept for exactly this day.

Grant called that night for the first time in ten days.

"You told them about the boy," he said. "You put the child on the board's calendar."

"You mean his own family's board."

"You have no idea what you've started." His voice was shaking. "Nadia, if you stand up in that room with those anklets, they will end you, and I will be standing next to them, because I have nowhere else to stand. Please. Drop the petition. Take a settlement. Let me keep Miles's life intact."

"Miles's life is the whole point," I said, and hung up, and went to see Loretta Pruitt.