Chapter 18 Ninety-Nine Point Nine Nine

*Rhys*

Probability of paternity: 99.99%.

Rhys read it on his phone in the back of the car, on the harbor road, at seven-forty in the morning.

Then he read it again from the top: the case number, the names, the long column of markers with their paired numbers that meant nothing to him, the combined index, the line at the bottom. Calloway, Rhys, alleged father. Fairley, Pippa, child. Fairley, Felix, child. Not excluded. 99.99%.

The thing he thought of, absurdly, was buttons.

He'd done ten. Eight on the shirt, two on the jacket, and the cuff twice because he'd lost count of what he was doing and the boy hadn't. Ten. And a whisper from behind Margot's knees, into his sister's ear, a voice so small Rhys had only caught it because he'd been listening for nothing else. *Ten.*

The car came off the harbor road and into the tunnel under the tower. In the dark the screen lit his face. He scrolled up to the top of the report and down again. None of the numbers changed.

His phone buzzed while it was in his hand. Owen.

*They've got the Sutter photo up on the lobby screens. All four. Do you want it taken down?*

He hadn't asked for a photographer yesterday. He'd walked out of a lunch meeting with his phone at his ear, and Vivienne had been on the sidewalk, and her hand had been through his arm before he'd finished his sentence. There'd been a man across the street with a long lens who had not been there by accident.

Rhys hadn't asked who called him. He found, sitting in the back of the car, that he would rather not know.

*Take it down*, he typed. Then: *Clear my noon.*

---

His grandfather's room on the cardiac floor smelled of hospital soap and, faintly, of the lilies someone had put at the nurses' station.

Edmund was sitting up. They had him in a chair by the window today, a big vinyl hospital recliner, with a tray table across his lap and the travel chessboard on it. Rhys's white pawn had moved again. So had a black knight. Someone had moved it for him, and he hadn't asked about that either.

"Grandfather."

Edmund looked up. His eyes were clear. Rhys still wasn't used to it. For five years he'd sat with a man who peered at him through a fog, who laughed at the television and slept through Christmas, and Rhys had believed that was the stroke, because the doctor had said it was the stroke, because Ursula had said, because Delphine had said.

Now the fog was gone and there was a person in there again, and the person was looking at him as if he'd come late to a meeting.

Rhys sat on the edge of the bed. He had no idea how to begin, so he began as he began board meetings, with the number.

"The test came back," he said. "The children. Margot's. They're mine."

Edmund's face did nothing at all for a second.

Then it went red. It went red from the collar up, the good side and the slack side both, and the tendons stood out in his neck, and his mouth opened and pulled sideways and fought. His left hand gripped the arm of the chair.

A noise came out of him, a strangled hum, and the monitor on its pole beside him jumped from seventy to a hundred and ten and began to complain.

"Grandfather. Easy."

The right hand moved.

It had lain in his lap like a dropped glove for five years. Rhys watched it come up off the blanket, shaking, the fingers half-curled, two inches, four, and then it came down on the tray table with a crack that made the water jump in its cup and knocked the black knight onto the floor.

"Fool," said Edmund.

It was thick and wet and perfectly clear. He was looking right at Rhys when he said it. His chest was heaving.

A nurse put her head around the door at the alarm. Rhys held up a hand: *fine.* She checked the monitor, then Edmund's face, and backed out without a word.

Rhys picked the knight up off the floor. He set it back on the board, on the wrong square, and moved it to the right one.

His grandfather had said four words to anyone in five years. One of them was her name. Two of them had been at Delphine, *no, no,* an old man confused and frightened by a face leaning over him. And now this one.

For him.

"I know," Rhys said.

Edmund turned his face to the window, down to the courtyard where the crocuses were already finishing, and would not look back at him for the rest of the hour.

---

Larkmoor at dusk was gray shingle and lit windows. Delphine met him in the hall in a cream cashmere wrap and took his coat herself, and kissed his cheek, and had a glass of red already poured on the table in the drawing room by the fire.

"Sit, sweetheart. You look exhausted. Owen called. He said you'd want to talk."

Owen hadn't called. Rhys had texted his father, and his father must have told her. He sat.

Conrad was at the window with a whiskey, as he was most evenings by six. He raised it at his son without turning around. "So it's true," he said. "Christ."

"It's true."

"Well." Conrad drank. "Well, that's that, then."

Delphine sat on the arm of the sofa beside Rhys and put a hand on his shoulder, light, as she had the first winter she was at Larkmoor, when he was twelve.

A soft voice in the hall. A woman who'd brought him a cup of cocoa the first night he couldn't sleep in that house and sat with him on the stairs while it went cold. He had never forgotten it.

"Then we have to think about what's best for them," she said. "Don't we? For the children. Pippa and Felix." She said their names carefully, as if she'd practiced them.

"Sweetheart, they belong here. At Larkmoor. With family. With their great-grandfather, now he's improving. With people who can give them everything. Not in that little fish-market house with the roof falling in and a woman who..."

She stopped. She let him finish it himself. She'd always done that, and he'd always been grateful, because it had made the thought feel like his own.

"Full custody," Delphine said gently. "Benedict says it's very possible. With your resources. With her history. I know it's hard. I know you thought, once, that she was..." Another stop. "But you have to be practical now. For them."

"She's right," said Conrad, to the window. "Full custody. Get it done."

Rhys turned the glass by its stem and didn't drink from it.

"I told Grandfather," he said. "At noon."

Delphine's hand stayed on his shoulder. "Oh, sweetheart. How did he take it? Did he understand?"

"He understood." Rhys looked into the wine. "He hit the table with his right hand. He said *fool*."

Conrad laughed, a short bark at the window. "Well, he always did have a vocabulary."

"His right hand," Delphine said. Her voice didn't change, but her fingers moved on Rhys's shoulder, a small press, there and gone.

"That's wonderful. That's real progress. Dr. Fairley must be very pleased with herself." She smiled down at him. "You mustn't take it to heart. He's confused, sweetheart. They warned us he might be, coming off his medication so suddenly. He said *no* to me last week, do you remember? *No, no*, as if I were a stranger. It broke my heart. He doesn't know who anyone is half the time."

He knew who Margot was, Rhys thought. He'd known her the first second.

He kept it behind his teeth and watched the fire. Delphine stroked his shoulder once more and took her hand away, and the place where it had been went cold.

His phone lit on his knee. A message from Vivienne. No words. A single red heart.

He turned the phone over.

---

He didn't go home. He told the driver the tower and sat in the back in the dark and let the phone lie where it was on the seat beside him.

Felix behind her legs. That was what he kept seeing. The consult room the first day, the boy in the doorway. The parking lot by the harbor park on Saturday. Yesterday on the beige carpet. Every time Rhys came near, Felix went behind her.

And every time, the boy's small hand had a fistful of her coat. Not her hand. Her coat. As though he'd learned that a coat was harder to take away from you.

Pippa on the seawall, blue to the eyebrows. *Sharks have to say sorry by swimming backwards.* Looking up at him, patient with how slow he was. *That's why they never say it.*

And Margot, laughing. Once, into the wind, before she could stop it. He hadn't heard her laugh in five years. He tried to remember if he'd heard it in the three before that, and found that he couldn't, and sat with that in the dark until the car stopped.

---

Owen was still in the outer office at nine-fifteen, which meant Owen had known he'd come.

He followed Rhys into the corner office without being asked and put a document on the blotter. It was thick, bound at the top with a black clip, and the first page said MOTION FOR TEMPORARY ORDERS: CUSTODY.

"Carrow's people filed it at five," Owen said. "For the hearing tomorrow. They want sole legal and physical, interim, pending a full hearing. Supervised visitation for the mother."

Rhys sat down and turned the pages. Paragraph after paragraph. *Respondent's history.* *Respondent's involvement in the medical emergency of the petitioner's grandfather.* *Respondent's unilateral removal of the minor children to a foreign jurisdiction.* *Unsuitable residence.* *Respondent's demanding surgical schedule.* It was all true, in the way that a balance sheet is all true.

"Will it work?" he said.

Owen took his time. He was standing by the desk with his hands behind his back, in the same gray suit he always wore, with the same face he always wore, the face of a man reading out a delivery manifest.

He'd worked for Rhys for nine years. He kept a copy of everything. Rhys had never once seen him look away from what was in front of him.

"You'll win," Owen said. "You've got the money, the house, the name, and a judge who'll have read Crane five years ago. Carrow thinks interim custody by May." He paused. "They'll lose their mother."

Rhys looked up.

"That's the cost," Owen said. "Line item. I thought you'd want it on the page."

The word came up out of Rhys by reflex, as it always had. The word he'd used on boards and on lawyers and on his father and on Margot, in the hall on Lantern Row, with the divorce papers on the table between them. The word that closed a subject.

"Noted," he said.

He heard it this time.

It went out across the desk and landed on the blotter between them, and Owen didn't move, and the word didn't go anywhere. Nothing closed. It just stayed there, small and cold.

Rhys sat looking at the motion under his hand and heard himself say it again in his head, in that hall, five years ago, while she was trying to tell him something about a study door.

*You didn't let me get to the end of the sentence,* she'd said yesterday, in a parking lot, with her voice gone low.

She hadn't. He'd seen to that with one word.

Owen waited.

Rhys got up. He went to the window. Below him the harbor was black, the cranes blinking red along the quay, and beyond them the lights of Old Harbor climbed the hill. Somewhere up there was a narrow house with a stockpot under a leak. His thumb found his ring finger and pressed there, and pressed, and found nothing.

"Get Carrow on the phone," he said. "Tonight."