Richard Harrington came home on the last flight into Columbus two days before he was expected, and did not call ahead.
The house on Maple Court was lit — porch lantern, kitchen pendants, the blue flicker of a television nobody was watching — and Diane was asleep in the front room with a magazine open on her chest. On the kitchen table, squared to the edge the way Gerald squared everything, sat the case file. Summons, discovery, the plea offer. Richard hung his coat over a chair. He made a pot of coffee the way a man does when he has decided not to sleep.
He read until the coffee went cold and then he made more.
At some point near two, Diane appeared in the kitchen doorway in her robe, and stood looking at the spread of paper the way you look at a man reading the results of his own biopsy. "Richard," she said. "Whatever that is, it can wait until you've slept."
"No," Richard said, not unkindly. "It can't. I've let other people read things for me for years, Di. Lawyers. You. Tyler, mostly." He turned a page. "I want to know what it actually is. Sit with me, if you want."
She didn't sit. But she didn't go back to bed either, and a while later a second mug appeared at his elbow, and neither of them mentioned it.
He read the deputy's report. He read the insurer's letter, which used the phrase recovered asset the way other letters say the deceased. He read the photographs Mike Callahan had taken from his own porch: his son, in his son's car, in another man's driveway, at hours when honest people were asleep. He read the logbook pages twice. Dates. Times. Plates. And near the back, a note in the same blocky hand that Richard found he could not stop looking at: Boy looked tired. Hope somebody's feeding him.
At four in the morning he went and stood in the doorway of Tyler's old room, which Diane had kept exactly as it was, trophies and all, and he tried to do the arithmetic of his own absence and could not make it come out to anything but the number it was.
At six he called his office in Denver. "Cancel the apartment," he told his assistant. "For good. I'll be working from Ohio for the foreseeable future." There was a silence down the line in which he could hear a young woman revising several assumptions. "It will be," Richard said, answering the question she hadn't asked. "That's rather the project."
When the sky went the color of wet newspaper, he showered, shaved, put on a clean shirt, and walked down Maple Court in the early light. The street was doing its morning: sprinklers, a dog being apologized to, the Callahans' garage door going up on a truck that had work to do. He stopped at the foot of their driveway like a man at a border, and then he walked up it, the whole twelve feet, and knocked.
Mike opened the door with a socket wrench in his hand. He looked at Richard the way you look at weather you hadn't scheduled.
"Mr. Harrington," he said.
"Mike." Richard's voice did what it could. "I'm not here about the case. There isn't anything about the case I'm asking for, and if your lawyer's told you not to talk to me, I'll go." He took a breath that had nineteen years of hotel rooms in it. "I read the file last night. All of it. I'm here to say I'm sorry. For Tyler — what he did to you and Sarah and this street, he did, and it's his to answer for. And I'm sorry for my part, which is that I wasn't here. A boy doesn't get to twenty-four like this in a house where somebody's paying attention. I was paying attention to other things."
Mike was quiet a moment. Then he stepped back and held the door.
"Coffee's on," he said. "Sarah will want to hear it too, and she makes the good kind."
They sat at the kitchen table, the three of them, while the sun finished arriving, and Richard did not make a single excuse. He said whatever Tyler owed, Tyler would pay, earned, not wired. He said he did not know if his son would let him help him do that, and that this was the sentence in the whole conversation that cost him the most.
When he stood to go, Mike walked him out onto the porch.
"For what it's worth," Mike said, "you raised a kid who's got a decision in front of him. Ten days, Gerald said. What he does with it's still his."
"I know," Richard said. "That's the hard part. It always was. I just wasn't in the room for it."
He walked home down the middle of the empty street, slowly, like a man reading it for the first time.
Chapter 23: The Plea