"No," I said. "It's not."
He picked up the photograph again. Looked at it once more, the last look, the one you gave a thing before putting it away somewhere safe.
"Can I keep this?" he said.
"It's yours." I paused. "I had a copy made before I sent it to Tran."
He looked at me.
"You made a copy," he said slowly.
"The day after we found the building. Before I gave it to Tran." I held his gaze. "I knew I was going to have to hand it overand I knew I wanted one. So I made a copy." I paused. "I have it in my room."
My father was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his face, the fracture again, the third time I had seen it from him, and I was beginning to understand that the fractures were not weakness. They were the places where something real was pressing against the surface.
"She's in both our rooms now," he said.
"Yes," I said. "She is."
* * *
He left at nine. I stood at the door and watched him go down the stairs, my father, returned, making his way back out into a city that was the same city it had always been and also different, the way all things were different when you returned to them from the far side of something that had changed you.
I closed the door.
The apartment was quiet. The river was doing what it did. The light in the office was on.
I went and stood in the doorway.
Dominic looked up.
I said: "She had three laughs. The third one was quiet. Just for things that caught her completely off guard."
He held my gaze.
"She was right about most things," I said. "And she knew it and didn't apologize for it."
Something moved across his expression. "I see," he said.
"I thought you'd want to know me," I said. "Since you, since we..." I stopped. Found the sentence. "Since you're going to be someone who's around."
He was quiet for a moment. Not the calculating quiet, the other kind. The kind that was feeling something and giving it the room it needed.
"Tell me more," he said.
I came in from the doorway and sat in the chair by the window and told him.
* * *
Chapter 32: Ruined by Moreau
The charges were filed on a Tuesday in November, which was the kind of timing that felt arbitrary until you understood that federal cases moved according to their own logic, indifferent to the significance of the calendar to the people who had been waiting on them.
I read the filing at my desk.
My desk was in the room next to Dominic's office. They had moved the filing boxes in September, a Saturday morning project that had taken three hours and had involved a disagreement about the correct organizational system for archived documents that had been resolved, eventually, in my favor, though Dominic had never explicitly conceded. The room had good southern light. I had put a plant on the windowsill that was, against my prior understanding of my own capacity for plant stewardship, still alive.
I read the filing carefully, the way I read everything, completely, in order, not skimming. The charges against Victor Salas: conspiracy, money laundering, civil rights violations under federal statute, accessory after the fact in connection with the death of Margaret Callahan in March 2001. The charges against the estate of Ramón Salas, filed posthumously, which carried no criminal penalty but which would enter the public record permanently: conspiracy, murder in the first degree.Gerald Fosse: obstruction of justice, conspiracy. His cooperation agreement detailed.