Chapter 20: On Their Knees

At eight the next morning my parents stood at the gate of the grey house.

My father wore a black coat and no tie.

My mother wore the same pearls.

Neither of them had slept.

"You said not here," my mother said when the guard let them in as far as the front steps. "You said we could talk."

"I said not in a police station," I said.

I stood at the top of the steps with my hands in my sleeves.

Rowan stood beside me without his cane.

Tobias sat on a chair that Rowan's housekeeper had brought out, wrapped in a blanket, with a nurse hovering.

Along the road, one by one, the neighbors had come out.

A man in a bathrobe held a coffee.

Two women in running clothes stopped on the curb.

A boy on a bicycle put down his foot.

Rowan's men did not tell them to leave.

"You wanted me to drop the complaint," I said. "I'll tell you what it costs."

My mother pressed her hand to her chest.

"Anything."

"Kneel."

Nobody on that road breathed.

"Faye," my father said. "This is a family matter."

"It stopped being private when you signed my kidney away in your study at half past two in the morning."

His jaw moved.

"I will not kneel in a public street."

"Then you can go home," I said. "And the detective will have your signature on a video by lunch."

My mother looked at him.

She looked at him for a long time.

Then she lowered herself to the stone, in her good coat, and her knees hit the step with a soft sound.

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