The folder had more than my father’s message in it. Ambrose had been paying child support through the court the entire time, every month, never late, and Odile pulled the disbursement records the following week. Delphine had been receiving it. She had also been telling our parents he had stopped, which is how she had been collecting eleven hundred dollars a month from my father on top of it. Two years of that. My father had never once checked, because checking would have meant considering that his daughter was lying, and he had chosen the easier arrangement and called it peace.

Delphine did not come home early. That is the detail people always stop at. She finished all four weeks, posted photographs from Rome and Florence and Nice, and landed to an emergency motion already filed. Odile had the order modified inside six weeks. The judge read Rowan’s folded paper, the one he had kept hidden in a notebook with his father’s address on it, and I watched a woman on the bench take a moment before she spoke.