Chapter 24: Not a Secret

On the ninetieth day I sat at the kitchen table of the Park Avenue house with a pen and one sheet of paper.

It was the withdrawal of my petition.

Marcello stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and did not come in.

He had kept every rule for ninety days.

He had asked Miles each morning if he could walk him to the door.

Miles had said yes most mornings and no on nine of them, and Marcello had gone home quietly on the nine.

He had never once complained.

A letter from the district attorney lay open beside my coffee.

Chiara had pleaded guilty to forging records and to filing a false report on a child.

She would serve eighteen months, and she would never practice law again.

I had read it once, and I had felt nothing but a plain, quiet relief.

It was not the center of my day anymore.

"You can read it first," I said.

"I'd like to."

He crossed the kitchen, took the sheet in both hands, and read it from the top.

He read every line.

Then he set it down in front of me, and put the pen beside it.

"It's yours to sign," he said. "Or not."

I looked at the paper.

I thought of the girl of twenty-three in a registry office, smiling at a camera for no reason she could have named.

I thought of eight Christmas Eves and a plate left in an oven.

I thought of a drawer full of crooked suns.

"I'm signing it," I said. "Not because you earned it."

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