She nodded slowly and picked up her pen.
"Okay," she said. "Let me tell you what this is and what it isn't." She set the pen down again, which I hadn't expected. "This isn't a deposition. Nothing you say here is going to be quoted back to Mr. Henley or used against him in any formalproceeding. What I'm doing is building a picture. The file I have tells me facts: address history, employment, the record. What it doesn't tell me is whether there's a person behind those facts who can raise a child." She looked at me steadily. "That's what I'm asking you for. Your honest read. Not a character reference you'd sign your name to, not a recommendation. Just what you know."
I nodded.
"And if what you know is limited," she said, "that's fine too. Tell me that and we'll work with what we've got."
I looked at my hands for a moment.
What I knew was not limited. That was the thing. Twelve years of distance and I could still have told Phelps what he took in his coffee, which side of the bed he slept on, the exact way his jaw tightened when he was trying not to say something. I knew him the way you know a place you'd grown up in—not always accurately, not always fairly, but in the bone. The question was how much of that was still true, and how much of it was just me, preserved in amber, knowing a twenty-four year old who no longer existed.
"What I can tell you," I said, "is twelve years out of date."
Phelps nodded. "That's a fair place to start." She picked up her pen. "Tell me about his relationship with Lily."
"I can't speak to that directly," I said. "Lily was born after I left. I know he saw her. Cassie mentioned it when we were in touch. But the specifics, how often, what it looked like… I don't have that."
Phelps wrote something. "So you're not able to speak to his capacity with children."
"Not from observation, no."
"What can you speak to?"
I looked at the window. The parking lot, the grey morning, a man in a high-vis jacket crossing toward the entrance with his head down.
The honest answer was that I didn't know what I was doing here. I'd come because Jack had asked and I hadn't been able to think of a good reason to say no. And now I was sitting across from Karen Phelps at eight in the morning, trying to figure out what twelve-year-old information was actually worth in a room like this.
"Was he reliable?" Phelps said. "When you knew him."
"Yes," I said. "Very."
"Can you give me an example?"
I could.
"Our landlord was useless. Heat would go out and he'd just… not fix it. Jack would handle it. Not make a big deal about it, just sort it." I paused. "That was kind of how he was with everything. You didn't have to ask twice. You didn't really have to ask once."
"What about stability? Employment, that kind of thing."
"He'd been working since he was sixteen," I said. "Left his dad's when he could, kept himself going. Never missed rent, never missed a shift as far as I knew." I paused. "He just… got on with things. Didn't need anyone chasing him."
Phelps wrote something, then looked up. "What do you know about his family background?"
And there it was.
I took a breath. "His dad drank. Wasn't violent, not that I saw, but he was… well, it wasn't a good house to grow up in. Jack didn't talk about it much." I hesitated. "But you could tell."
"Did it affect him?"
"He was careful," I said. "Like, with people. Always aware of… I don't know. Of how much space he was taking up." I took a deep breath, thinking back through the years. "I thought that was a good thing, when I knew him."
Phelps looked at me for a moment. Her pen was still.
I kept my face where it was.
There was something I wasn't saying, and it had nothing to do with Lily. It had to do with me—with a night a long time ago that had ended one way and not another. But whatever had broken between us was between us. It wasn't a safeguarding issue. It wasn't a reason to keep a five year old out of her uncle's house. It was just a thing that had happened, personal and old, and not relevant to anything in this room.
That's what I told myself.