Chapter 17: It's One Performance

The mediation room was a county conference room with a long table and a jug of water nobody touched.

Brad sat on one side with his lawyer and Mona, in a gray suit I had pressed for him two Christmases ago.

I sat on the other with my lawyer.

Nolan waited in the hall on a plastic chair, because I had asked him to be near and not in it.

The mediator was a woman with reading glasses on a chain.

"I don't decide anything," she said. "I find out whether two parents can agree before a judge has to."

She turned a page.

"Mr. Althouse, your petition says Junie should live in the family home with her brother."

"She has a room there," Brad said. "She has a family there."

"She has a mother," I said.

"Mrs. Althouse left the home on her own," his lawyer said. "She took a seven-year-old out of a stable house."

"And she is working for a man she met a week later."

"Nolan Faraday hired me after the Halloween show," I said. "I had never spoken to him before."

Brad smiled at the mediator.

"My wife is emotional. I don't blame her. I'd like to be as reasonable as I can."

My lawyer slid her phone to the middle of the table.

"Mr. Althouse, this is a voicemail you left on Halloween morning at seven twelve," she said. "I'd like it heard."

"Whose phone is that?" his lawyer said.

"It was sent to me by the person it was left for."

Everyone looked at Mona.

She was looking at the water jug.

My lawyer pressed play.

Brad's voice came out of the little speaker, easy and warm.