My Last Wish novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Papers

I opened the door and knelt on the porch boards so we were the same height.

"Hi, sweetheart," I said. "Are you hungry?"

"Chad said no pasta."

"Chad isn't here. Come see Teddy."

I did not ask her one question.

She ate three bowls of pasta at Dane's table and fell asleep with her cheek on the rabbit.

Dane's doorbell camera had caught the sedan, the open car door, and the plate.

I called the police non-emergency line and told them a three-year-old had been left on my porch.

The officer who came wrote it all down, and photographed the label inside her coat.

It was sewn in a neat label-maker strip.

MACTIERNAN.

At eleven, a white car stopped outside, and Tierney came to the door in her coat with her hair pinned up wrong.

She lifted her daughter from the couch without a word to me.

At the door she said, so quietly the officer didn't hear it, "He said you would keep her."

"I would have kept her."

"I know," Tierney said. "That's the difference."

On Friday morning, the judge read my doctor's letter all the way to the end.

Then he asked Chad's lawyer if he'd heard the recording, and played forty seconds of it.

Chad's voice came out of the speaker on the judge's desk and filled the small room.

"I took it to that restoration shop on Elm Street."

The judge looked at Chad over his glasses.

"Mr. MacTiernan, is there a restoration shop on Elm Street?"

Chad opened his mouth, and his lawyer touched his sleeve.

The judge denied the emergency petition and sent Teddy home with me.

At noon I filed for divorce at a window with a brass grille, and a clerk stamped the page.

I carried the copy out into the sun.

That night the woman with the napkin number kept Teddy for a sleepover, because she had insisted.

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