Chapter 22: Four Walls

The county court needed four weeks to make everything official, and it took one morning to read it out.

The judge confirmed the adoption from nine years ago, and the paper said what I had been saying all along.

Linus Winslow was my son.

Imogen's petition was withdrawn by her own lawyer, and she sat in the county jail without bail, waiting for a trial that nobody doubted.

The divorce was signed the same afternoon, because Keegan did not contest a word of it.

His lawyer read out a short list, in the flat voice of a man who had told his client what it would cost.

Keegan would give up the house on Maple Court.

He would sell the Winslow Agency and put the money in a trust for Linus.

He would give a full statement to the district attorney about the policy, the photographs and the signature on the hospital form.

The judge allowed him supervised visits, on Saturdays, in a public room, with a social worker present.

The public room turned out to be the community room at the Harlan Springs library.

I had asked for it myself.

I worked there on Thursdays, and I knew every table.

On the first Saturday I stood in the biography stacks with a stack of returns in my arms and listened through the open door.

I wasn't supposed to be listening.

Nobody had told me not to.

Keegan sat at the end of the long table in a plain gray sweater, without a tie.

He had lost weight.

He looked like a man who had been told to wait in a hallway for a long time and had finally started to understand why.

The social worker sat by the window with a clipboard on her knee.

Linus came in with Mr. Fenn under one arm and his hands in his pockets.

He did not run, and he did not hug.

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