Chapter 15: What the Fund Paid

Rosemary's POV

Timothy came home at noon with a folder under his arm and a face I had not seen on him.

It wasn't angry. It was empty.

Milo was asleep upstairs. I was at the island with a cup of tea going cold.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm sitting."

"Then don't get up."

He laid the folder on the marble and opened it, and he put the photograph on top.

A boy in a yellow raincoat held a gray rabbit by the ear.

"That's Milo at one," I said. "That's the raincoat Calvin's mother gave him." My voice came out wrong. "Who took this?"

"A man she paid."

He laid out the rest, one sheet at a time, and he didn't say a word while I read.

The investigator's invoice. The date on it was the week I had first told my sister I was pregnant.

The Fund ledger, with a yellow line, M.R., and the first payment on it from the winter Milo was ten months old.

I had been told then that a hospital program for families was covering the specialists.

I had learned the name Hargrove ten months ago, at a lunch, from a man who pulled out my chair.

The seating chart lay last, with the arrow.

C. next to T. Insist.

I put my hand flat on it.

"She never asked who his father was," I said.

"No."

"For ten months. I thought it was manners." I laughed, and it came out as something else. "She knew."

"She knew before he was two."

"And she let you stand in that bar for a year."

"She let me stand in that bar," Timothy said, "and she poured me tea."

His hand was on the marble beside mine, the left one with the scar.

It was shaking, very slightly.

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