Chapter 5: Show Me the Paper

Maureen Quinn opened her door at one in the morning in a flannel robe, holding a spatula.

She took one look at the child in my arms and the snow in my hair, and she put the spatula down.

"Get in here."

Maureen ran the Hearth House cafeteria, and she had slipped Birdie extra rolls for a year, whenever the rules let her look away.

She had also packed up our room at the shelter the day after the lobby, because she knew I would not be back.

"Your boxes are in my hall closet," she said. "I figured."

She put Birdie in her own bed under a quilt and sat on the edge of it until Birdie was asleep.

Then she came into the kitchen, cracked six eggs into a pan, and said, "Tell me."

I told her in about four sentences.

The bracelet. The coat. The dinner. The man who stood there with his mother's emeralds in his fist and said nothing.

Maureen flipped an egg.

"I've been waiting six months for you to say the word 'clinic' to me out loud," she said. "You never did."

"I said it in the lobby."

"You said it to a hundred people. You never said it to me."

I sat at her table.

She set a plate in front of me, and I ate it.

I had not realized how hungry I was until the yolk was gone.

"You need paper," Maureen said.

"He said that."

"He's right, for once. He's a man who reads a contract before he reads a face. So give him a contract."

"I don't have one."

"You have the envelope."

I looked up.

She did not blink.

"Birdie's baby book. You showed me once, the night Birdie had croup, and told me never to bring it up. It's in the second box."

I did not need to ask which box.

She brought it to me in both hands.

It was a cheap pink book from a drugstore, with a lamb on the cover and the corners soft from handling.

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