"He tightened his grip when she was weakest," Arthur said.
Priya reached for the letter — the copy Arthur had made, since the original never left his study drawer — and found the passage by memory, though she didn't read it aloud. Arthur knew it anyway.
I stopped being able to fight him, Dad. Not because I was scared. Because Lucas needed the medicine more than I needed to be right. I tell myself you'd understand that.
Arthur stood and went to the window. Somewhere across the city, Lucas was at school — Mrs. Doyle had insisted on enrolling him, and on new shoes, and on a coat that fit — and Arthur had no idea what he was supposed to do with the knowledge that his daughter had measured her pride against her son's medicine and found the medicine heavier.
"He was a good man," Arthur said, after a long time. "David."
"The record says so." Priya rose. "The union men who worked with him — I spoke to one, an older man named Okafor. He said David Mercer never cut a corner and never let anyone else cut one either. He said the scaffolding failed because the company had changed the bracing spec over the crew's objection. There was a settlement. It's in the file."
"A settlement."
"Two hundred thousand. It went to Caroline. She signed it without reading it. She told Okafor she just wanted it over."
Arthur nodded, and did not trust himself to speak.
After Priya left, he opened the folder and took out the photograph's twin — Okafor had given Priya a copy, the three of them on some roof with the city behind them — and he looked at David Mercer's face for a long time. A foreman. A man who had held a boy on his shoulder. A man Arthur had refused to meet, whose name Arthur had used, once, as a kind of weapon, and then never said again.
He had told Caroline the man wasn't enough. He had been wrong about what enough meant.
He put the photograph in his breast pocket, where it would stay for the rest of the day, and went downstairs to ask Mrs. Doyle whether Lucas liked roast chicken, because it was the only thing he could think of to do.
Chapter 10: The Will
Priya Raman arrived at the townhouse on a Thursday morning with a leather portfolio and the particular expression Arthur had come to associate with documents that would change things.
"She made a will," Priya said, without preamble, in the study. "Two years ago. A legal-aid clinic in Queens drew it up. It's simple, Arthur. It's valid. And it names you."
Arthur looked up from the letter — the pages fanned on the desk like something he was afraid to breathe near. "Names me for what."
"As Lucas's guardian. In the event of her death."
The clock on the mantel ticked. Outside, a delivery truck sighed to a stop on the street below.
"Two years ago," Arthur said. "She'd been gone eleven years. She hadn't spoken to me in eleven years. And she named me."
"She named you," Priya said. "Not Nathan. You."
Arthur folded his hands. He was seventy-two years old and had negotiated the terms of mergers that decided the employment of ten thousand people, and he found that his hands were shaking. "Does Nathan know."
"He will by Friday. I'm filing the petition this afternoon. There will be a hearing." Priya set the portfolio down. "Arthur, I need to tell you plainly: he will challenge it. I've run the angles. He has standing — he's the boy's uncle, he's been the boy's source of support, he can argue continuity of care. And he will be very good at it. He's been coached by lawyers since he was twenty-five, and most of them work for us."
"Then we hire others."
"We will." She opened the portfolio and took out a single page. "But I want you to see what he's going to say. His position, stated cleanly, will be this: the child has lived in Queens, in a one-bedroom walk-up, cared for by a dying mother and a checkbook. The uncle has paid the rent, the medical bills, the groceries, for four years. The grandfather is a stranger the boy met seventeen days ago, whose existence the boy learned about from a ring."
Arthur was silent.
"That's the strong version," Priya said. "He'll say it with regret in his voice. He'll say he doesn't want a fight, he wants stability. And a judge will listen, because none of it is false."
"Some of it is false," Arthur said. "The part where he cared for the boy."
Priya's mouth tightened. "The part where he cared for the boy is going to be the hardest part to prove and the easiest part for him to perform. You know that."
He did know that. He had watched Nathan perform at board meetings for twenty years — the attentive tilt of the head, the practiced silences. A judge would see a polished executive who had kept a roof over his nephew's head. A judge would not see the gate at the estate, or the returned letter, or the phone call Nathan had answered and answered for.
"The hearing," Arthur said. "What will they ask of Lucas."
"They may not ask anything of him. He's seven." Priya hesitated. "But Nathan's counsel will argue that the boy's preference matters, that the child knows his uncle and fears — "
"Fears what."
Fears change. They'll argue he's afraid of you, Arthur. Not because you've done anything. Because you're the stranger with the big house, and Nathan is the man who showed up with money when his mother was sick.
Arthur stood and went to the window. Below, the bare branches of the pear tree moved in the wind.