Chapter 23: A Chair for Everyone

Alana read the note twice more in the car park, and then she handed it to me.

It said: "I need to see you once before they take me to Kings County. Nobody else. I will make this right."

"He wants me in a room alone," she said. "That's what he's always wanted."

"You don't have to go."

"I know." Her voice was steady. "I want to."

They gave her ten minutes in the holding room behind the club.

I stood at the window in the corridor with her mother, and we watched through the glass.

Rodney sat at a steel table in his shirtsleeves, with the bare place on his shoulder where the eagle had been.

He had aged ten years in an afternoon.

Alana sat across from him and kept her hands on her knees.

I could not hear a word, but I could read the shape of it.

He leaned in and talked fast.

He took something from his pocket and slid it across, and her mother made a sharp sound beside me.

"A bankbook," she whispered. "He's got a bankbook."

Alana picked it up and opened it.

She looked at the last page for a long time.

Then she set it on the steel and pushed it back with two fingers.

Rodney's face changed.

He stood up so fast the chair fell over.

The MP at the door stepped in, and Rodney pointed at her, and I read his mouth.

"After everything I've given you," he said.

Alana stood.

She said something short.

Her mother grabbed my sleeve.

"What did she say?"

I could read that, too, because I had been waiting nineteen years to hear it from someone.

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