Chapter 9: Lawyers

The video was up before I got home.

By Monday morning it had two million views.

Somebody had cut it down to half a minute.

Carter on one knee on Second Street, holding up the ring, his voice breaking on "our baby."

Me, standing over him, saying "No."

That was it. That was the whole clip.

No girl in a jean jacket saying "oh, ew." No Sam. No monkey.

By Tuesday it was on the local news under a banner that said KIDNAP SURVIVOR FIGHTS FOR UNBORN CHILD.

By Wednesday there were two news vans on my block in Fitler Square, and a man with a camera on my neighbor's steps.

The papers came that afternoon.

A courier brought them to the clinic, in front of my nine o'clock.

Carter Appleton was asking a judge to declare him the father of my baby before she was born.

He wanted to be told the minute I went into labor.

He wanted to be in the delivery room.

He wanted his parents' names on a list for "regular, meaningful contact."

He wanted me barred from leaving Pennsylvania for the rest of my pregnancy.

I read it standing up in my office.

Then I sat down on the floor.

Polly found me there at lunch.

She read it over my shoulder and said, "Okay, that's it," and called her husband.

At six o'clock a very large firefighter in a Ladder 11 T-shirt was sitting on my front steps in a lawn chair, eating a hoagie.

The man with the camera left at six-fifteen.

The vans left at seven.

"He says he's on vacation," Polly told me. "He says this is the most relaxing thing he's ever done."

I made him a pitcher of iced tea.

He drank all of it.

On Thursday, my father called a meeting.

He held it at the house in Chestnut Hill, in the living room, not the dining room. I noticed that.

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