Chapter 32: After the Divorce

"He's allowed to stand there," Winslow said, at my shoulder. "I checked with the pretrial office on Thursday. A pass until seven, for final affairs."

"You checked."

"I check everything."

"Of course you do."

I took the camel coat from the chair and put it on over the white silk.

It fit exactly as it always had.

Winslow did not ask where I was going.

He gathered the hem of the dress and the coat where they would have dragged.

He carried them to the door.

Behind us the ballroom had gone quiet.

Four hundred people were watching two figures cross the floor and a third on the pavement below.

By the time we reached the lobby, the green jackets had come out of the ballroom behind us, without being asked, and lined the stairs.

They stayed at the top of the steps.

They did not follow us out.

The cold hit my face when the doors opened, and the street smelled of wet pavement and bus exhaust.

Darrell was waiting at the curb in the gray suit.

The woman in the windbreaker nodded to me and took one polite step back, to the Tower's brass planter.

He looked at the dress under the coat.

He looked at Winslow.

His face had gone thinner in two weeks.

He did not look like a man who had been to prison yet, only a man who had been told its address.

"You look," Darrell said, and stopped.

"Say it."

"Happy."

"I am."

He nodded.

Both of us stood a moment, looking at the same two yards of wet sidewalk.

"I came to give you this."

He held out the fountain pen.

The steel cap was worn pale at the clip, where his thumb had gone for six years.

"I signed the plea with it," he said. "The clerk let me keep it."

He held it out a little farther.

"I thought it should go back to the person who paid for it."

I took the pen.

It was warm from his hand.

"I wrote sixty letters," Darrell said, rapidly, as if he'd rehearsed it.

"One to each of them, by hand. The doorman gave me the names."

He swallowed.

"I owe them something that isn't a speech."

He took a bundle from his inside pocket, tied with the kind of string you use on a parcel.

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