They came into that room and arranged themselves around a wheelchair the way people arrange themselves at a closing.
Caspian put a leather folder down on the table.
"It's a fair number," he said. "Two hundred thousand, today. You sign the dissolution, you relinquish legal and physical custody of the boys, and you go."
Marisol's mouth did something when he said the word boys.
Adelaide Thackery came round to the side of my chair, took my handbag off my lap, and put the folder there instead.
And she said, to a room of twenty-two:
"Give me that. The boys need the Thackery name and a stable home, not a bitter woman. Sign it. Everyone's here."
Nobody said one word.
His sister Odile was four feet away and looked at the window. The uncle by the door had his hands folded like a man at a graveside.
There was a nurse at the corridor end of that room who had come in behind them and had not left, and a social worker called Deshawn Pryor standing just inside the doorway with a lanyard on, who had been assigned to me on the second day for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this and who did not move.
