"Getting there. She has her preferences." I thought of the dry cereal, the specific way she lined up her apple slices. "I know what they are now."
She wrote something else. "School?"
"Mrs. Alvarez says she's engaged. Quiet, but engaged." I looked at the table. "She doesn't talk about it much at home. The school stuff. But she shows me things sometimes. A drawing, something she made. Like she wants me to know without having to explain the day."
Sandra looked up from her notes. "That's actually a really good sign. That she's showing you things."
I nodded, though I wasn't sure why it felt like a win.
She closed her folder. "I'm going to be honest with you, Mr. Henley. When I picked up this case I had questions. The background, the lack of contact, all of it." She said it without apology, which I respected. "I still have some. That's just the nature of a thirty day review… we're looking at a snapshot."
"I understand."
"But." She put her pen down. "What I see here is a man who got on a plane the same night he got the call. Who sorted housing and employment inside two weeks and shows up at school pickup every single day." She paused. "And a little girl who is grieving, which she will be for a long time, but who is also eating and sleeping and going to school and showing her uncle her drawings."
The kitchen felt very still.
"I'm recommending the guardianship proceed to formalisation," she said. "You'll hear from Phelps by end ofweek. After that it goes to the courts, which is mostly paperwork and a hearing. Four to six months, give or take."
"Thank you," I said. My voice sounded thicker than I wanted it to.
She stood, picked up her folder. Then she paused at the door. "One more thing." She looked at me steadily. "Keep doing what you're doing," she said. "Don't overthink it."
She let herself out.
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time after the sound of her car faded. Through the doorway, I could hear the rhythmic, quiet scratch of Lily’s pencil.
I got up and went to see what she was working on.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jack
Mrs. Alvarez called at eleven-thirty to say Lily had a temperature and someone needed to come get her.
I was under a Jeep Cherokee when the phone buzzed. I told Bellows, who told me to go, and I went. Forty minutes later I was back at the garage with Lily in tow. The pediatrician had written it off as a twenty-four-hour bug—nothing to worry about, just rest and fluids—but I couldn’t leave her home alone and I couldn’t take the afternoon off. We had three cars backed up and Bellows was already covering more ground than his back liked.
"She can sit in the office," Bellows said, looking at Lily the way he looked at most things—steadily, without expression, waiting to see what they'd do.
Lily surveyed the office. It was a cramped space off the main bay with a desk buried in invoices and a window that looked out onto the forecourt. She looked at Bellows. Then she marched in, sat down, and unzipped her backpack.
Bellows watched her pull out a homework folder. Then he looked at me.
"She's quiet," he said, as if he’d been bracing for a siren.
"She's sizing you up," I said.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh and went back to work.
She lasted twenty minutes before she appeared at the threshold of the bay, her small shadow stretching across the oil-stained concrete.
"I finished my homework," she said.
I looked at her from under the hood of a Silverado. "All of it?"
"All of it."
"Then read your book."