Chapter 19 Withdrawn

Tamsin was eating a granola bar in the courthouse lobby at ten to nine, with a binder under her other arm thick enough to stop a door in a gale.

"Carrow called me at eleven last night," she said, before I'd gotten my coat off, "and said nothing useful. For nine minutes. He asked after my health. He asked if I'd had a nice Easter. He said his client 'wished to be heard this morning,' which, yes, Benedict, that is what a hearing is." She bit the granola bar in half. "Which means they've got something."

"What kind of something?"

"No idea. That's what scares me." She steered me toward the security line with her elbow. "Come on. I've got fourteen reasons the judge is going to laugh them out of the room and I want to say all of them before ten."

The Probate and Family Court was red brick on Court Square, its white columns painted so many times they'd lost their edges. Inside it smelled of floor wax and wet umbrellas, and everyone was stamping off the last spiteful sleet of the year.

We found a bench outside Courtroom 3. Tamsin opened the binder on her knees and began to talk at a speed that would have alarmed a court reporter.

"They're going to ask for interim custody. Sole legal, sole physical, pending a full hearing. They're going to ask for the kids to live at Larkmoor, because Larkmoor has a lawn and a greenhouse and a full-time staff and, I quote from the draft affidavit I am not supposed to have seen, 'a stable multigenerational household.'"

She licked a crumb off her finger. "Stable. Ha. Okay. Reason one: you're their mother and you've been their only parent for four and a half years without a single concern from anybody, anywhere, ever.

"Reason two: Zurich pediatric records, which I have, all of them, every vaccine, every echo. Reason three: their father met them three weeks ago. Reason four: he met them because they walked into his grandfather's consult. Reason five..."

I let her go. I'd learned at twenty-one, in the grad dorms, with the walls between our rooms so thin I could hear her highlighting case law at one a.m., that the best help for Tamsin Reyes before a fight was a wall she could throw things at.

I put my hands flat on my knees and watched the courtroom door.

"Reason nine," said Tamsin, "is the Edmund thing, which they're going to bring up, and which I want them to bring up, because no charge was ever filed and the family themselves declined to press. If Carrow wants to make a five-year-old non-accusation the center of a custody case, I will personally make him explain to a judge why his client never called the police." She glanced up. "You're humming."

"I'm not."

"You're humming Helen's ironing song. You only hum that one when you're scared."

"I'm not scared."

"Then stop." She took my hand and squeezed it, hard, without looking up from the binder. "Nothing is happening to those children today. Do you hear me? Nothing."

At twenty past, Tamsin went to find the clerk about an exhibit, and left me alone on the bench with the binder.

I heard Delphine before I saw her. The soft click of low heels on wax, unhurried. Then she was standing in front of me in her gray coat, a little out of breath from the stairs.

"Margot." She didn't sit. She bent slightly toward me instead, as you'd bend toward a patient in a bed.

"I wanted to say. Before we go in. Whatever happens in there, I hope you know none of it is personal. Not on my side. Rhys is hurt and he's frightened and he's a Calloway, and Calloways go to lawyers the way other people go to bed. But I've always been fond of you, my dear. You know that."

"Thank you," I said.

"And the children. I'd so love to meet them properly. Pippa and Felix." She smiled. "Such good strong names."

I thought of the foxglove in its specimen bag in the drawer of my bedside table, wrapped in two paper towels, the bells gone brown at the edges by now. I thought of Edmund pulling his hand out of hers, two tries.

"How's the greenhouse?" I said.

Her smile stayed exactly where it was. "Oh, coming along. Everything's early this year. It's been such a mild spring under the glass." She touched my shoulder with two gloved fingers. "Good luck, Margot. I mean it."

She went to sit in the courtroom. I watched her go in, and found my hands were flat on my knees again, pressing.

---

Courtroom 3 was wood-paneled and too warm, with a clock over the door that ran four minutes fast. Tamsin and I took the table on the left. At the table on the right sat Benedict Carrow, gray and narrow and dry as an old ledger, turning the pages of his binder with one finger. The chair beside him was empty.

Behind us, in the public seats, there were a dozen people. Two were reporters; I could tell by the notebooks.

In the second row, alone, in a gray cashmere coat with a silk scarf at the throat and gray kid gloves folded in her lap, was Delphine.

She saw me look. She gave me a small, sad, encouraging smile, the kind you give at a funeral to the second cousin.

I turned back around.

Rhys came in at two minutes past nine by the real time. Dark suit, white shirt. He walked up the center aisle without looking at the public seats and sat beside Carrow, and Carrow murmured something, and Rhys answered too low to catch.

He didn't look at our table. He put his hands on the wood in front of him, one over the other.

His thumb was still. It was the first time since the consult room I'd seen it still.

"All rise."

The judge was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and an air of having heard every variety of human nonsense twice. She sat. We sat. The clerk read the case number into the air: Calloway versus Fairley, petition to establish paternity, custody and support, and motion for temporary orders.

"I have the paternity results," the judge said, turning a page. "Not contested, I take it, Ms. Reyes."

"Not contested, Your Honor."

"Then paternity is established." She made a note. "Which brings us to custody. Mr. Carrow, I have your client's petition and a motion for temporary orders filed yesterday afternoon. Rather a thick one." She weighed it in one hand without enthusiasm. "Go ahead."

Carrow stood.

He buttoned his jacket and opened his mouth, and beside him Rhys stood up too.

Carrow stopped. He gave his client a look I'd never seen on a lawyer before: a perfectly blank face with something working hard behind it.

"Your Honor," Rhys said. "If the court will allow. I'd like to address the court myself."

The judge regarded him over her glasses and took her time about it.

"Mr. Calloway, you are represented by counsel. Very expensive counsel, by the look of him."

"I am. I'd still like to speak. It'll be short."

The judge glanced at Carrow. Carrow, after a moment, sat down. Slowly.

"Briefly, Mr. Calloway."

Rhys kept his eyes on the bench.

"I'm withdrawing the petition for custody," he said. "All of it. The motion for temporary orders too. I'm not asking for interim custody. I'm not asking for any custody. I'm not asking the court to order anything."

Tamsin's pen stopped moving.

Behind us someone in the public seats said "*What?*" out loud and was shushed.

"Paternity's established," Rhys went on. His voice was level and a little rough. "I'd like that on the record. I'll pay whatever support the court thinks is right, back to the day they were born. I'm not asking for anything else." He paused. "I'd like to see them. When and where Dr. Fairley decides. If she decides. That's all."

He sat down.

The room had gone silent. The fast clock ticked over the door.

I didn't turn around. I didn't have to. I could see Delphine anyway, in the polished brass of the water jug on our table, small and curved and upside down. Her face hadn't moved. It was the same face, the funeral face, gentle and concerned.

But in her lap, her gloved hands had come together, and the right one was gripping the fingers of the left, hard, wringing the gray kid between them.

Beside Rhys, Carrow was looking at his shoes.

The judge took off her glasses and let them drop on their chain. She studied Rhys, and then me, and then the motion on her desk, which she closed.

"Ms. Reyes. Any objection to the petitioner withdrawing his own petition?"

Tamsin stood up. She opened her mouth. She closed it. I had known her for nine years and had never seen her without words.

"No objection, Your Honor," she said finally.

"Then the custody petition and the motion are withdrawn, without prejudice. Paternity is established. Support to be agreed between counsel or set by the court within thirty days." The judge wrote. "Mr. Calloway, I'll say this, because I don't get to say it often. That's the first sensible thing anyone's done in my courtroom this week." She looked up. "Next matter."

---

The sleet had turned to a fine cold slush by the time we came out onto the courthouse steps. Tamsin came through the doors behind me with her binder clasped to her chest, saw Rhys on the top step turning up his collar, Carrow already gone ahead with his phone at his ear, and went straight for him.

"What game is this?"

"No game," Rhys said.

"Absolutely not. Nobody files a forty-page motion on Wednesday and drops it on Thursday. What's the play?

"You withdraw, we relax, and next month you file in a different county? You get her to agree to visits, you build a record, and then you come back with a psych evaluation? Because I'll tell you right now, Mr. Calloway, I keep everything, I keep every text..."

"Tamsin," I said.

She stopped. She was breathing hard. She glared at me, then at him. Then she walked three steps down and stood there in the slush with her back to us, the binder clamped to her chest.

Rhys was still on the top step. He hadn't buttoned his coat. Sleet was settling on his shoulders and in his black hair and he didn't seem to notice.

"Why?" I said.

He didn't explain. I'd known he wouldn't. He looked out at Court Square, at the wet bronze soldier on his plinth and the traffic hissing around him.

"I read a report," he said.

"Which one?"

He turned to me then and looked at me properly. I couldn't remember the last time he'd done it. His eyes were the green I saw every morning at breakfast, across the table, over a bowl of cereal and a stuffed shark.

"Mine," he said.

I let that stand for a moment. Three steps down, Tamsin had gone still, listening with her whole back.

"Then this is how it works," I said. "If it works."

He waited.

"I decide when. I decide where. I decide what they're told, and I'm the one who tells them. You don't bring Carrow or Owen, and nobody just happens to be across the street with a long lens." I held his eyes. "The first time I read about my children in a gossip column because of you, it's over. I won't argue it. I'll just stop answering."

He didn't interrupt. I watched him take each word as it came.

"Yes," he said.

"Saturday," I said. "I'll tell you where."

Then the doors opened behind us and Delphine came out, buttoning her gray coat, her scarf at her throat, her gloves back on and smooth. She saw us and her face filled with soft warm worry, and she started toward Rhys with one hand already lifting to his arm.

He was already moving. He went down the steps, past Tamsin, past his stepmother's lifted hand, into the slush, without looking back at either of them.

At the bottom he stopped and half turned. He said it over his shoulder, to me, as if it were an appointment he was confirming with a stranger.

"Saturday. Ten. If they want me."