Chapter 15: Objection

I went down to the gate myself.

Valerio walked three steps behind me and stopped where I told him to.

Whitman's father stood on the sidewalk in the same grey suit as yesterday.

Up close he looked older than sixty-one.

"Josephine," he said. "You look well."

"I am well."

He held the envelope through the bars of the gate.

It was heavy cream paper. The firm's crest was on the flap.

I opened it.

A cashier's check for five hundred thousand dollars, made out to me.

Under it, three typed pages, with a yellow flag at the signature line.

I read them twice, right there on the sidewalk.

I agreed never to claim, in any setting, that I had written any filing of Kittering & Sons.

I agreed that my testimony yesterday had been "the product of medical distress".

"It's generous," he said. "More than the settlement."

"The settlement was nothing."

"Then it's infinitely more." He tried to smile. "The firm's name is a hundred years old, Josephine. It's all my family has."

"Your family has my briefs."

He flinched.

"Sign it," he said, "and we can all move on."

Behind me, Valerio didn't say a word.

He didn't need to. I could feel him there.

"I'll give you my answer at your office," I said. "Ten o'clock. In the lobby."

"Why the lobby?"

"Because that's where your son said I'd come back crying."

The Kittering & Sons lobby was marble and glass, on the ninth floor.

At ten in the morning it was full.

Two receptionists at the long desk. Clients on the leather couches. Associates crossing with coffee.

The young associate who'd winced in my divorce meeting saw me and stopped walking.

Whitman's father came out of the elevator.

Whitman came out of his office down the hall, and his mother came out behind him.

They had heard I was there.

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