Margaret called at six forty-five.
'It's done,' she said. 'All four hundred and twelve pages. Certified, sourced, filed with federal contacts overnight. Warrants are being processed.'
'And Stephen?'
'He made one call after I briefed him.' A pause. 'Three words. Full deployment. Tomorrow.'
I stood at the bedroom window with the phone pressed to my ear. Below, the street was still gray and quiet. Conrad was in the shower. I could hear the water running through the wall.
'I'll be there by ten,' I said.
'We'll be ready before that.'
I hung up. I set the phone face-down on the windowsill and looked at the street for another moment. A cab moved through the intersection below. A woman walked a dog. Ordinary things, going on the way they always did, indifferent to everything.
I got dressed.
Conrad was out of the shower by seven fifteen. He dressed without speaking much, which was unusual — he was normally a morning person, easy and unhurried, filling the room with small talk the way other men filled it with music. This morning he was focused. Precise. He checked his reflection twice.
I handed him his coffee.
'You should wear the gray,' he said, glancing at what I had on.
'I'm fine in this.'
He looked at me for a second. That assessing look. Then he nodded and picked up his jacket and went downstairs.
I stood in front of the mirror. I pressed two fingers lightly to my throat, where the bruising had settled into something dark and definitive beneath my collar. I adjusted the collar. I picked up my coat.
In the coat pocket, my phone. Unlocked. The livestream function already open, already connected to the Simmons family's private encrypted channel. I had tested it twice last night in the dark of the study.
I went downstairs.
We drove to the mansion in separate cars.
---
I knew what I was walking into before I walked into it.
Not because Conrad had told me anything. Because I knew him. Ten years of watching a man perform sincerity teaches you to read the performance even when it's directed at someone else. The call from Oscar on Tuesday. The careful way Conrad had said *important family business*. The fact that he'd told me the time.
He wanted me there. That was the tell. If this were truly a family matter, he would have found a reason to leave me out.
He needed an audience. He needed a room.
Violette's car was already in the drive when I arrived. I noted that without surprise. I handed my keys to the attendant, smoothed my coat, and walked up the front steps.
The foyer was too quiet for ten in the morning. Staff moved through it with the careful, peripheral efficiency of people who had been told to stay out of the way. No one met my eyes.
I was shown to the formal council room at the end of the east wing.
I read it in three seconds.
The long mahogany table, every Nichols elder seated along its length like a tribunal. Oscar at the head, his face already set in the particular way it got when he had decided something and was waiting for the formality of deciding it out loud. Conrad standing to one side, composed, his hands clasped in front of him. And Violette — already positioned to Conrad's left, her eyes red, a tissue folded in her hand, the whole performance already running.
The doors closed behind me.
I walked to the empty chair across from Conrad and sat down. I folded my hands on the table. I looked at each face in turn, unhurried, and I let them look back at me.
Violette's chin trembled on cue.
Oscar cleared his throat.
Conrad set a document on the table and slid it forward. A single page, official-looking, bearing a laboratory letterhead and two columns of numbers. He let the silence hold for a moment — he had always had good instincts for theater — and then he spoke.
'I think you know why we're here.'
I looked at the document. I looked at him.
I said nothing.
'The child,' Oscar said, his voice thick with controlled fury, 'is not my son's.'
Violette made a small, wounded sound. Right on schedule.
I kept my hands folded on the table. I kept my face exactly where it was. Around me the room was a closed fist, every face in it already decided, the verdict already written in the arrangement of chairs and the pre-positioned grief of a woman who had spent the morning practicing it.
Let them finish, I thought. Let them say every word.
My right hand rested on the table, three inches from my coat pocket.
I was not afraid. I noted that the way you note the weather.
I waited.
