Chapter 15: Next Door

The memo ran forty-two minutes.

We listened to all of it, at his grandmother's kitchen table, with the litigator breathing on speaker.

Spencer laid out the date of the proposal.

Kelsey picked the ballroom.

Brett picked the song for my walk down the aisle.

It had been my favorite song since I was twelve, and he knew it.

At minute thirty, Spencer said, "And if she cries?"

And Brett said, "She won't. She never makes a scene. That's the beauty of Sadie."

His grandmother set the phone down very gently on the table.

Then she got up, went to the sink and stood with her back to us.

Caelen put his hand flat between my shoulder blades.

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

By eight the next morning the pink phone was sealed in an evidence bag in the litigator's office on Federal Street.

By ten, a copy of the memo was on my laptop in the glass room.

At eleven, the receptionist called up.

"Ms. Lowell. There's a Mr. Corwin in the lobby."

"Which one?"

"The young one. He says he flew in last night. He says he'll wait as long as it takes."

The analyst with the three-color whiteboard looked up at me.

"Want me to tell him you're out?"

"No," I said. "Bring him up to the conference room. And stay. All four of you."

Brett walked in looking like he hadn't slept on the plane.

Wrinkled shirt. No tan left. His hair, for once, not perfect.

He saw the four analysts at the long table and stopped.

Then he saw the litigator at the end of it with her canvas tote.

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