The third floor was quieter than the lobby. A nurse at the station halfway down pointed me toward Family Services without getting up. I walked past a row of closed doors. Through one of them someone was crying, low and steady. I kept walking.
The woman outside the door marked Family Services was late forties, dark blazer, a file folder held against her chest. She had the look of someone who spent their days in rooms like this—not hardened exactly, just settled.
She looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything for a second.
I thought about the rig. The platform, the wind, the flat nothing of the North Dakota horizon. Six months out there and nobody had needed anything from me that I couldn't deliver with my hands. The problems were physical. You could see them. You either fixed them or you didn't and either way you knew where you stood.
This was going to be different.
"Mr. Henley."
"Yeah." I looked past her down the corridor. "Lily—is she here?"
"She's safe and being looked after." A pause, measured. "If you'll come in, there are some things we need to go through first."
I looked at her for a moment. Then I followed her in.
The room was small and neutral, the kind of room designed not to feel like anything. Two chairs across a table, a box of tissues nobody wanted to acknowledge. She sat and set the file down and I saw my name on the tab before she'd opened it. She'd been preparing for me.
She folded her hands and looked at me with the careful expression of someone about to ask questions they already knew the answers to.
I sat down. I had a feeling this was going to take a while.
Chapter Eleven
Jack
Her name was Karen Phelps. It was on a small placard on the table, the kind that had been there long enough to fade at the edges. She had a legal pad, a pen, and my file, which she opened without ceremony. She looked at me patiently, as if she’d done this many times already and stopped expecting it to be easy.
"Mr. Henley. First, I'm sorry for your loss. Genuinely." She meant it, I could tell, but she also said it in a way that indicated this was something we needed to move past. "I want to be straightforward with you about what this conversation is. I'm doing a preliminary kinship assessment. That means I need to understand your situation and your intentions before we can talk about next steps for Lily." She paused. "So let me start there. What are your intentions?"
I looked at her.
It was a reasonable question. The most reasonable question I’d ever been asked. I'd been on a plane for five hours and in a rental car for forty minutes and in a medical examiner's office for twenty… and I had not once, in any of that time, asked myself what I was actually planning to do.
"I'm here," I said.
"I understand that. But being here and taking guardianship of a five-year-old are two different things." She wasn't unkind about it. "Do you want to raise Lily?"
The truth was… I didn't know.
I was thirty-six years old and I'd spent the last twelve years moving from one rig to the next, one state to the next, accumulating nothing on purpose. I didn't have a home. I didn't have a routine. I'd been alone long enough that I'd stopped noticing it. I knew nothing about children—less than nothing, maybe, given the only example of fatherhood I'd ever had up close.
I thought about my father on that damn porch. The cans on the railing. That comfortable, settled certainty that the math always came out the same way in the end.
"As far as we’ve been able to assess, Lily has no other family. So if not you," Phelps said, carefully, "then we'd be looking at foster placement while we?—"
"No." It came out before I'd decided to say it. "She's not going into foster care."
Phelps looked up from her file.
I thought about a girl I’d known a lifetime ago—someone who’d grown up in a system that was fine on paper and indifferent in practice. I remembered the way she’d described moving from one house to the next, never unpacking her bags because tape leaves marks and marks mean you were there. I’d spent three years trying to convince her she was permanent, only to prove her right in the end.
I couldn't do that to Cassie's kid. I wouldn't let Lily become another ghost in a file.
There was only me, and that would have to suffice.
"I want to take her," I said. "I'mgoingto take her."