She had gone to my mother eleven weeks pregnant, while I was in Portugal opening the Lisbon property. Marguerite offered her four hundred thousand dollars and a relocation agreement, and when Delphine refused, my mother produced a settlement document already bearing my signature. It was genuine. I had signed it eighteen months earlier as a blank corporate authorisation during a week of closings, one of forty pages my mother had asked me to initial, and she had held it back and had it repurposed. Delphine read my name at the bottom of a page renouncing any claim to me or to my family and she believed, entirely reasonably, that I had arranged it and had been too cowardly to say so.

She was standing in that terminal because she was finally leaving Michigan for good. Seven years of two jobs and one room, and the boys are called Emrys and Tobias, and the one with the notch in his eyebrow is the one who does not talk much.

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