Chapter 8

Three weeks later the courier box gave its answer in a lawyer's office that smelled of new carpet and cold air.

Cormac's lawyer was a tired man named Alder. He slid a folder to Cormac. Cormac slid it, unopened, to Sable.

"You first," he said.

She opened it. Numbers, and a paragraph of lab language she had to read twice. Then the line that mattered, printed in a bold the machine didn't know was cruel or kind.

Probability of paternity: 99.98 percent.

Sable laid the page flat on the table and held it there with two fingers, the way you hold something down in wind.

Twenty-three years of being nobody's. And here was a number saying otherwise.

"Why didn't you find me?" The words came out smaller than she meant them to.

Cormac set his hands flat on the table beside hers. Not touching.

"We found your mother four days downstream," he said. "Not you. They dragged that river three weeks, and then they handed me a paper that said presumed. Presumed." He said it like a swear. "I drove every county road south of that bridge for two years. I put your face in the papers. I called every place that'd taken in a child that spring."

He turned the faded band on his finger.

"A woman up in the hills had pulled a little girl off a bank and loved her and raised her. Alder's investigator pulled the guardianship file out of that county last month and found a neighbor who'd known Glenna for years. She never took a city paper. She never saw a single notice. She kept quiet about where you came from because she was afraid somebody'd come take you." His voice went rough the way it had over her wrist. "By the time you were old enough to work a counter off I-70, I'd stopped looking anywhere but a booth where a girl had my wife's face."

Alder cleared his throat and said the other thing gently, because it was the smaller thing in that room. The full audit had come back. Corporate had moved Odelle's leave into a formal process; there'd be a hearing in a few weeks, with the board, and the sheriff's office had its own file now. The two tracks were separate, and both were finally moving.

Sable barely heard it.

She looked back down at the page. At the born name typed by a lab that had never met her gramma. Briony Grace Lassiter.

She opened her mouth to say something - thank you, or his name, or the question still under the question - and no word came.