Chapter 2

The man in the doorway was tall, fair-haired, wearing a light blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up like he'd driven straight from a job he was proud of. He carried a gift bag with silver tissue paper and a bottle of wine in the other hand. His smile was mid-forming, the way a smile looks when someone takes a picture at the wrong moment — the mouth open, the eyes uncertain.

He was looking at Aaron. Then he was looking at the paper in Aaron's hand. Then at Renee, whose face had gone the color of the frosting on Mateo's cake.

"Renee?" Michael's voice was a pitch higher than his entry line. "What's going on?"

The guests had gone past silent into the kind of quiet that becomes its own sound. Somewhere a refrigerator hummed. A wall clock with a second hand ticked through the hardness of the moment. Mateo had picked up the little dinosaur figurine from beside the cake and was turning it over in his fingers, watching the adults, not speaking, his small calm face unreadable.

"You tell me," Aaron said. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "You initialed a box on a custody petition that removes my son from my legal custody. This is my legal right to raise him. This is my visitation log, my case plan, my family. And your initials are in the margin beside hers."

Michael's face drained. He set the gift bag down, slow, like it was full of something heavy. The wine bottle clinked against the floor. "I didn't—" He stopped and started again. "She said it was paperwork for the guardianship. Temporary. She said you'd signed everything before you left and this was just the renewal while you were overseas. She said you knew."

Aaron studied him. The man wasn't lying — that was the first clear thing in the whole room. Michael looked sick. His hands had gone loose at his sides.

"Did you read what you initialed?"

"I skimmed it," Michael said. "She was in a hurry. She was feeding the paperwork through before the clerk's office closed, and she said it was routine, and the box said something about agreeing to a review. I trusted her." He looked at Renee, and there was something helpless in his face. "Renee? You said it was temporary. You said it was standard for the boy's care while his father was away."

Renee found her voice. It was small, the way the prompt had known it would get — a voice with all the brightness scrubbed out. "It *is* standard. Every lawyer in the county will tell you. Guardianship review is routine when a parent is absent for more than six months. I filed it so the boy would have coverage. So his therapy appointments would keep being authorized. So if something happened, Michael could sign off. That's all."