Chapter 5

Theo pulled the envelope open. It made a sound like paper tearing — a clean, deliberate rip, the sound of a decision being made. He pulled the carbon out and unfolded it on the bench, flattening it with both hands, and Amelia watched his face as he read.

He read it for a long time. Or it was a short time — she couldn’t tell, the way you can’t tell time in a room that has stopped moving. He read the top line, and his eyes went down the page, and he read the bottom, and then he went back to the top and read it again, as if the words were changing between readings.

“Well?” Brenda said.

Her voice was sharp, impatient, as if she were the one waiting. Amelia looked at her, at the way her hands were clasped in front of the burgundy silk, at the way her weight shifted from one foot to the other.

Theo looked up from the page. “It’s dated six weeks ago.”

“I know what it’s dated.”

“Then you know what it says. You signed it, didn’t you? You signed it, and you folded it, and you left it on the bench where somebody would find it.”

“I did not leave it there,” Brenda said. “I set it down this morning to answer the phone, and the phone rang, and I got distracted. It was supposed to be in the safe.”

Theo laughed. It was a short, broken sound, the sound of a man walking on a floor that had given way under his foot. He lifted the page, and Amelia saw it properly for the first time: a cream carbon, the kind that comes out of an old-style form, with the blue-ink print bleeding into the fibers, and across the bottom of the page, a signature.

Brenda’s signature. Amelia knew it from the permission slips, from the notes that went to school, from the receipts on the kitchen counter. Looping and unmistakable, in wet blue ink that had pressed through into the carbon beneath.

“You named yourself guardian,” Theo said. His voice was flat, the drawl stretched thin, like a wire about to break. “You signed a form giving yourself guardianship of a child whose father has only been gone six weeks. Without his consent. Without his knowledge. Without a court order.”