Chapter 15: Page Fourteen

Rocco's POV

She didn't speak in the car.

Gia drove, and Ada sat in the back with her coat buttoned to the neck and the nurse's phone in a plastic bag on her knee.

I watched her in the side mirror all the way across the bridge.

She was looking out of the window at nothing.

I had said it in front of the five families, and it hadn't cost me as much as I'd thought.

It was the other thing that would.

At home Gia took the phone to the safe, and Ada went straight up to the east wing.

I stood in the hall for a while.

Then I went into my study, opened the bottom drawer and took out the gray folder.

I carried it up the stairs myself.

She opened the door before I knocked, with her coat still on.

"You've been walking back and forth under my room for an hour," she said.

"Ada."

"Say what you came to say."

"I came to give you this."

I held out the folder.

She didn't take it.

"What is it?"

"The hearing. Everything the board printed about you."

"I've read it. I was there."

"You haven't read this one."

I put it into her hands.

She opened it standing in the doorway, and I watched her turn the pages.

On page nine she stopped.

"Who signed this?" she read aloud, in my handwriting.

She turned the page, and the next, and the next.

On page fourteen she stopped again.

There was a box on the page, with two pencilled words inside it, pressed through the paper.

"Page missing," she said.

"I wrote that the night I read it. Four years ago."

She looked up.

"You knew," she said.

"I didn't know. I thought something was wrong."

"You thought a page was gone from my hearing and you signed the letter anyway."

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