Chapter 5
Patricia Novak stepped through the door at my back at that moment, because Patricia Novak had never in twenty-two years of family law missed her entrance, and her entrance was always timed to the moment when the emotional weather of a room had done the maximum amount of preparation work. She was sixty-one years old, five-foot-four, in a charcoal suit that had been expensive fifteen years ago and had aged into authority, and she set her briefcase on the conference table with a sound that drew every professional eye in the room.
"Gentlemen," she said, looking at Ethan's legal team with the pleasant and completely non-negotiable expression of someone who has sat across from better-resourced opponents than these and found the experience instructive. "I believe the terms of this proceeding require some revision. My client has documentation establishing paternity through results completed six weeks ago at an independent laboratory, a fact that creates certain obligations under New York family law that I'm confident your team is already aware of and will want to address before we discuss any finalization of the current instrument." She opened the briefcase and placed a single folder on the table. "I've taken the liberty of preparing an amended framework. We can begin whenever Mr. Hartwell's counsel is ready."
Ethan's senior attorney looked at the folder, then at Ethan, then at Rose, then back at the folder, in the sequence of a man updating a very large calculation in real time.
Ethan was not looking at his attorney. He was looking at his daughter.
"Can I," he said, and stopped. He tried again. "Is it all right if I—"
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. I could see what he was asking, the careful way he had positioned his hands at his sides, the unfamiliar hesitation of a man who had never in his adult professional life needed to ask permission for anything and was finding the experience disorienting and necessary.
I looked at him for a moment. At the face I had once known well enough to read in the dark, and then had stopped knowing, and was now looking at again with the particular distance of someone who has survived the version of a person and is meeting the remainder.
I reached into the carrier and lifted Rose into my arms properly, shifting her so she was facing outward, and I stepped forward one step and held her toward him.
He took her.
He held her the way people hold infants when they have no prior experience and the stakes are absolute, with the rigid careful terror of someone who understands that this is the most important thing their hands have ever been asked to do. Rose examined him with the serious attention she gave everything new, the line appearing between her brows.
May you like
Then she grabbed his finger.
The grip of a seven-month-old is a specific kind of force. Small and total and completely indifferent to the complexity of the situation it has entered. It simply holds. Ethan looked down at his daughter's hand around his finger and the expression on his face was not one I had a word for, not any word I had used about him before.
