"Not yet," I said. "But soon."
He nodded, and we drove home through the November dark, and I let myself do the one thing I had not done in nineteen years: I grieved Daniel Reyes, out loud, in the back of a black sedan, while Thomas drove and said nothing at all.
Chapter 12: Thanksgiving
Thomas invited us to Thanksgiving the way other people issued subpoenas: not optional, and resistance would be noted.
"You'll come," he said, driving me home the Tuesday before. "Both of you."
"Thomas, I have a trial calendar —"
"You have a trial calendar every week. It's Thanksgiving. There will be too much food and my grandson will talk about dinosaurs until you beg for mercy. You'll come."
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. "Is your wife all right with this?"
"She's the one who told me to ask." He paused. "She said, and I quote, 'That boy needs a holiday and that woman needs a plate in her lap.'"
I laughed despite myself. "Your wife has me exactly right."
"Ask him yourself," Thomas said. "He's ten, not fragile."
Priya arranged it — a day visit, loosely supervised, since Thomas was retired NYPD and Priya trusted him more than me, which was fair. I picked Noah up Thanksgiving morning. He climbed into the back seat in a clean flannel shirt still too big for him, wearing a careful expression.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
We drove to Queens in silence. I had brought nothing — Thomas had forbidden it — and my hands felt empty anyway.
The apartment was on the third floor of a brick building with a broken buzzer, the stairwell smelling of cooking from four countries. Thomas's wife, Rosa, opened the door before we knocked — small, formidable, flour on her sleeve — and looked at Noah like he was already hers to feed.
"Come in, come in," she said, pulling him inside by the shoulder. "You're too thin. We're fixing that today."
The apartment was cramped and warm and impossibly full. A folding table had been joined to the real table to seat nine. Thomas's daughter and her husband, the grandson (six, dinosaur-obsessed, exactly as advertised), Rosa's sister with three pies, a neighbor called Mr. Abernathy who appeared to have been adopted by the family years ago. Everyone talked at once. Nobody asked me what firm I was with.
Noah sat between the grandson and Rosa's sister, and within twenty minutes he was laughing at something the grandson said about a T. rex, and I had to look away.
Rosa put a plate in front of me that could have fed a family of four. "Eat," she said, and sat across from me watching the first bite like a medical procedure. "Thomas says you're a lawyer."
"Senior partner, actually. Or —" I stopped. "A lawyer."
"Good. Then you know how to argue, which means you'll survive this family." Her smile transformed her face. "He also says you're going to fight for that boy."
I glanced at Noah, deep in dinosaur negotiations. "I'm going to try."
"Trying is for people with options," Rosa said. "You don't have options. You have a son."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Rosa patted my hand and went back to the kitchen, leaving me with a plate in my lap, exactly as predicted.
* * *
After dinner, Thomas took the grandson and Mr. Abernathy downstairs for air. Noah and I ended up on the fire escape — his idea; he'd spotted it through the bedroom window. The November air was cold enough to see our breath.
After a while he said, without looking at me, "Can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"Why did you give me away?"
The question I had been dreading since the rainy Tuesday in the Garment District. I had prepared answers — God, I had prepared answers. Legal frameworks. Mitigating circumstances. A whole closing argument about youth and grief and best interests. Standing on that fire escape with the cold in my lungs, every one of them sounded like what they were: armor.
"No legalese," I said quietly. "No armor. You deserve the real answer."
He waited.
"I was twenty-three, in law school, pregnant — and the man I loved, your father, had died in a car accident two months before you were born. His name was Daniel. He was going to be a doctor." My voice caught. I let it. "When you were born, I looked at you and I saw him, and the grief was so big I couldn't see around it. My mother told me you deserved parents who could look at you and feel joy instead of grief, and I believed her, because I needed to believe it. So I signed the papers. I told myself it was the responsible thing. It wasn't. It was the act of a young woman who was drowning and grabbed the nearest rope."