Chapter 23: Final Hearing

"What do you want to ask me?" I said.

Nils kept his eyes on the baby.

"I don't want the cottage, or a vote on her name," he said.

"I want to be told if she's sick. I want to be at her birthday, in the back, if you'll allow it."

"And someday I want to say to her what I said to you. In my own words."

"Which was?"

"That I was wrong, and I knew it, and I'm sorry."

Anders stood very still on the other side of the bed.

I looked at the man I had been married to for six years, and at the child who had his chin.

"Yes to the first two," I said. "The third, you earn."

"She'll be old enough to decide for herself whether she wants to hear it."

"That's fair."

"It's not fair, Nils. It's what you get."

He nodded.

Then he did something I did not expect.

He turned to Anders and held out his hand.

Anders looked at it for a long second.

Then he took it, and neither of them said anything, and Pia loudly blew her nose.

Two weeks later, on the first Friday in July, I walked into the county courthouse.

I had a diaper bag on one shoulder and my daughter asleep against the other.

Anders walked on my left.

Pia walked behind us with a travel mug, because she had told me she was not missing it.

Courtroom 3 smelled of floor wax and old paper.

Nils was already at the table with his lawyer, in a gray suit that had been tailored for a thinner man.

Birgit sat in the second row, alone, in her good coat.

She had her pearls on again.

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