Chapter 15: The Lobby

I read Emerson's statement in the back of a cab with the petition open on my knees.

It was two pages long.

It said I had been obsessive about his food.

It said I had controlled what he ate without his knowledge or consent.

It said I was emotionally unstable after my mother's death, and that he had concerns about my fitness to raise a child.

At the bottom was his name, typed.

Under it, in small print, a line I almost missed.

Signed by Veronica Kenley, attorney-in-fact.

I told the driver to go to Market Street instead of South Philly.

Kenley Nutrition had the bottom three floors of a glass tower near City Hall.

The lobby was white stone and green glass.

A wall of glass fridges ran the length of it, full of Kenley Fuel shakes lit up.

Next to the elevators stood a cardboard Trina, life-size, holding a ribeye on a fork.

It was ten in the morning.

The lobby was full of people with lanyards, coffee and somewhere to be.

"I need to see Emerson Kenley," I told the front desk.

The young man behind it looked up and knew me.

Everybody knew me now.

"Do you have an appointment, Dr. Mayhew?"

"No."

He picked up the phone anyway.

Emerson came down in four minutes.

He came out of the elevator without a jacket, his sleeves pushed up, his assistant hurrying behind him.

He was still thin, but his color was back.

People stopped walking to watch.

"Luna," he said. "Is it the baby? Are you okay?"

"Did you eat breakfast?"

He blinked.

"Rice. Two hundred grams. And a banana. I weigh it now."

"Good," I said. "Then you can read."

I held the statement out to him.

He took it, frowning.

I watched him read the first paragraph.

I watched the color go out of his face again, page by page, the way it had in the ER.

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