Chapter 8: The File

We drove back to Newport in the dark, and I did not say a word until the bridge.

"Uncle W.," I said.

"I saw it," Derrick said.

"Heidi told me for twelve years she had no family."

"Your mother signed for Bradford's calls. I'll ask for his texts tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." I turned my head and looked at him. "You are very patient."

He glanced at me in the mirror and said nothing.

At Auchincloss House the lights were on in the study, and my mother's door was shut.

I did not knock.

I walked down the back hall to the security office, where Derrick keeps his files.

It was a small room with one lamp and a locked cabinet he had never once locked in front of me.

The cabinet drawer slid open easily.

The third folder was labeled DM.

It was four inches thick.

I carried it to the desk and opened it under the lamp.

The first page was dated three years ago in March.

It was a photograph of Dean outside a hotel on Lexington, laughing with his hand on the elbow of a woman in a gray cardigan.

I turned the page.

There was another hotel, another date, and the same two people.

There were nineteen of them.

The last one had been taken in August, outside the clinic in Park Slope.

Heidi's hand rested on her stomach, and Dean had his arm around her waist.

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