Chapter 10 Absolutely Not

The process server found me at the cafeteria register with a tray of tomato soup and a packet of crackers, digging in my scrubs pocket for my badge. He was in his fifties, in a raincoat, with a clipboard and the bored, patient face of someone who did this forty times a week.

"Dr. Margot Fairley?"

"Yes."

He held out a thick manila envelope. "You've been served."

The seal in the corner was the Commonwealth's, and under it, Probate and Family Court, Bramport Division. The first page showed through the window in the envelope. CALLOWAY v. FAIRLEY. Complaint to Establish Paternity.

I signed for it the way I'd signed for everything else from Rhys, in one clean stroke without looking up, and he walked away.

I read the first page standing there while the line backed up behind me. Shared legal custody. Shared physical custody. Two names I'd chosen in a delivery room in Zurich, typed under his.

"That'll be six-fifty, hon," said the woman at the register.

I paid for my soup. Then I sat down and texted Tamsin.

---

Tamsin arrived eleven minutes later. I'd sent her one word. She came through the cafeteria doors with her coat flying, a sandwich in one hand, talking before she reached the table.

"Okay, give it to me. Don't summarize, I want to read it. You haven't touched your soup." She sat down, took the envelope out of my hands, and put the sandwich in my place. "Eat that. It's turkey. I already had half."

Tamsin Reyes was five foot ten in heels and talked at the speed of a closing argument.

She had a law degree, a practice in a converted sail loft on the harbor, and a metabolism that had to be fed every forty minutes or it started taking hostages. She'd flown to Zurich four times in five years. She was the twins' favorite person who wasn't me, mostly because she let them eat cake for breakfast and called it brunch.

She read the complaint. All of it. Her mouth got smaller with every page, and when she reached the end she laid it flat on the table and put her hand on top of it.

"Absolutely not," she said.

"Tell me what he wants."

"Paternity, which fine, he'll get. The presumption's his and we're not going to pretend those kids came from a sperm bank in Basel." She opened my crackers and ate one. "But he also wants shared legal and physical custody, a schedule, and genetic testing within fourteen days, all expedited, because he's Rhys Calloway and the world runs on his calendar."

"And what do we do?"

"We answer. We admit nothing. Nobody swabs anybody until a judge signs a piece of paper that says swab. If he wants to see them before that, it's supervised, it's somewhere public, it's somewhere I choose, and I'm there eating something."

I'd spent the walk from the register to this table imagining Larkmoor. A lawn. A nanny. Benedict Carrow reading the word poisoner aloud in a warm courtroom. I'd let myself have eleven minutes of it. That was enough.

"Then here's what I want," I said. "I want the answer filed before he expects it. I want every page to say the same thing: a mother who works, two healthy children, no contact from him in four and a half years. I want a judge to read it and wonder what took him so long."

Tamsin stopped chewing.

"And Carrow will bring up the gala," I said. "Let him. I was never charged. His own family declined to press. If he wants to put a rumor from 2021 in front of a judge, I'll stand there and let him do it, and I'll be the calm one."

She looked at me for a second. She had a smear of mustard at the corner of her mouth and a look in her eyes I'd seen once before, the day she argued a dorm supervisor out of evicting me for keeping a dissected sheep heart in the shared fridge.

"Okay," she said. "Who are you, and can I keep you?"

"Can we win?"

Tamsin took the last of my crackers and ate it.

"Eat your sandwich," she said.

I ate the sandwich.

"One more thing." She dropped her voice, which for Tamsin meant only half the cafeteria could hear.

"The other matter. The one with the cliff house and the cane. Keep it out of this. If Carrow gets one sniff of money coming your way, he'll paint you as a woman who came home to cash in. Family court is about who's the safer harbor. Right now you're a surgeon who works too much. That's boring. Boring wins custody cases."

"I'm not interested in the money."

"I know that. A judge doesn't know you from a hole in the ground." She balled up the cracker wrapper. "Boring, Margot. Be so boring I want to cry."

---

Whitlock Hall stood on the cliffs at the top of the Heights with its back to the town and its face to the sea.

I'd seen it my whole childhood from the harbor wall in Old Harbor, a pale limestone shape high on the headland with lit windows at night.

Helen used to say it looked like a wedding cake somebody had left out in the rain. I'd been inside it twice since we landed, and both times I'd driven up the long gravel drive under the bare beeches feeling I'd been told to use the front door for once.

Ambrose Tolliver opened it before I'd rung. He was seventy and tall and slightly stooped, a heron who had gone into service. He'd been the butler at Whitlock Hall for forty years.

"Dr. Fairley." He took my coat. "Madame is in the study. She has had your message about the envelope, and she did not approve of it."

"Has she been swearing?"

"Only in French, Doctor. That is the good kind."

---

Beatrix Whitlock was standing at the study window, leaning on her cane. She turned when I came in. She was eighty-one and stood straighter than I did. Her white hair was in its knot. Her eyes, behind their heavy lids, were the pale gray of the sea on a cold morning.

"Give it to me," she said.

I gave her the envelope. She read it standing up, at full attention and with open contempt, and when she reached the second page she said something in French that made Ambrose close his eyes briefly and withdraw.

"Paternité," she said. "Garde. Custody. Of my great-grandchildren." She struck the floor with the cane. "That cold, arrogant, stupid boy. His grandfather was a gentleman. His father is a sponge. And he is a ship's ledger with legs."

"He has a legal right to ask."

"He has a legal right to go to the devil." She threw the complaint on the desk. "And this town. Five years ago, Bramport said you poisoned an old man. Not one of them knew you. Not one of them asked. And now they will say it again, in every drawing room on the Heights, because Rhys Calloway has hired a lawyer. Enough."

"Beatrix—"

"Enough. I have been patient for three years. On Monday morning I will walk into the Trust, through the front doors, under that ridiculous motto, and I will tell my son and every one of his clerks that my granddaughter is alive. That Iris Whitlock is alive." The cane came down again. "Let him take her children then. Let him try, when the whole city knows whose children they are."

"Madame."

Quentin Pruitt had been sitting so still in the wing chair by the fire that I hadn't seen him. He rose now, a precise gray man of sixty-six in a precise gray suit, and held up one hand.

"Madame, with the greatest respect, you will do no such thing."

"I will do as I please, Quentin."

"The claim is sealed. Your son knows a claim exists. He does not know the claimant's name, and he has no grounds to fight it in open court until a hearing is set. At this moment he can only wait."

His eyes came to me and went back to her.

"Announce Iris in the hall of the Trust, and he can fight us everywhere. In court. In the newspapers. He will say she poisoned one rich old man and has come for another family's money. And then he will use her children against her too."

Beatrix opened her mouth to answer him. I got there first.

"No announcement," I said.

She turned the stare on me. It had sent bankers out of rooms. I held it.

"I didn't come back to be a headline. I came back to find out what happened to my mother."

Her mouth tightened. She didn't interrupt.

"If we go public now, I spend the next year fighting about money in the papers, and the twins grow up with photographers at the school gate. Felix already counts the steps to every door. I won't have him counting cameras. And Rhys would get to point at all of it in court."

I picked the complaint up off the desk and squared its pages.

"I'll fight this one. In a courtroom, where there are rules. Not in your son's hall. Not yet." I set the pages down in front of her. "You found me on a ferry and waited three years for the right moment, Beatrix. This isn't it."

"So I am to sit at my own table," said Beatrix, "every Sunday, and watch my son eat my food, and say nothing."

"For now," said Pruitt.

"For now." She said it as if it were a disease. "I hate you both."

"Yes, Madame."

"I hate you both very much."

---

When they'd gone back to arguing about dates, I went out into the hall.

The portrait hung at the foot of the main staircase, where you saw it the moment you came in. Every time I came to this house I told myself I wouldn't stop in front of it, and every time I did.

Celeste Whitlock had been painted at twenty-three, in a blue dress, sitting sideways on a window seat with the sea behind her. She was small and dark-haired. She was holding a book on her knee, her finger keeping her place, waiting for the painter to finish so she could get back to it. Around her neck was a single strand of pearls.

I looked at her chin. Her mouth. The faint line between her brows. The tilt of her head, a little to one side.

I'd grown up with Helen's round, freckled, laughing face. I'd never seen my own face on anyone else. And here it was, on a stranger in a gilt frame, wearing someone else's pearls, looking out at me from more than thirty years ago with an expression I knew from my own mirror at six in the morning.

Behind me, footsteps on the parquet. Ambrose, carrying a small silver tray with a single cream-colored card on it. He walked past me into the study without a word.

I followed him to the door.

Beatrix took the card off the tray. It was heavy stock, engraved, with a line of handwriting below the engraving in blue-black ink. She read the front without any expression at all. She turned it over and read the back, and her lip curled.

"Do bring your Swiss doctor," she read aloud, in a voice like a blade being drawn. "I'm so longing to meet her."

Pruitt's eyebrows went up a millimeter. He crossed to the desk and read the card over her shoulder, twice.

"Madame," he said quietly. "Nobody has told your son that Dr. Fairley is your doctor."

The fire ticked in the grate. Beatrix didn't answer him. She held the card out at arm's length, as if it were something a cat had left on her doorstep, and raised her eyes to mine above it.

"Philip has invited us to Sunday lunch," she said.