Chapter 7

The kitchen was cold. Amelia felt it in the tips of her fingers, in the bare toes against her socks, in the seam of the rabbit she was holding with its belly gaping open. The page was on the table now, the bottom copy, the carbon that had been living inside her toy since before she could read.

Theo had not moved for a long time. He had read the bottom copy all the way through — the legal language, the signatures, the date — and he had set it down beside the top copy, and he had put his hands flat on the table on either side of them, and he had stared at the two pages like a man looking at two versions of a ghost.

“This is dated six weeks ago,” Theo said. It was almost the same thing he had said to Brenda — but his voice was different now. Flatter, hollower, the voice of a man reading the cause of death on a form.

“I know what it’s dated,” Brenda said.

“No,” Theo said. “Look at the date. Six weeks ago. You signed this six weeks ago.”

“I said I know what it’s dated.”

“But Denny signed it too. He witnessed it. Same date. Same signature. Your son signed a paper giving you guardianship of his daughter six weeks ago — and then he was gone the next day.”

Brenda’s hand came off the island. She stood very still, straight-backed, the pendant lights on the silver in her hair, and she looked at the two pages on the table and she did not answer.

“What happened that day?” Theo asked. “You got him to sign. You got him to give up his rights. And then he drove away, and you told everyone he’d left on his own, and you never filed a report. You never told the police. You never told me. You just took his daughter and you ran this house like he had died.”

“I protected the child,” Brenda said. The words came out hard, practiced, the words of a woman who had said them to herself many times. “I did what was necessary. Dennis was not — Dennis was not in a condition to raise her.”