She looked at it for a long moment. She didn't touch it.
"How did you find it?" she said.
I told her about the lining. About Mr. Avedian, and the seam ripper, and the white cotton with the blue thread. I took out my phone and showed her the photograph. She put on the reading glasses she wore on a chain and took the phone from me and held it at arm's length and looked at the little hand, the five spread fingers in their running stitches, and her mouth moved, and she gave the phone back.
"That woman," she said. "The Ukrainian. She looked at me the entire afternoon as if I were something on the bottom of her shoe."
"You were trying to take me away from my father."
"I was trying to save you." She said it quickly, and then she closed her eyes, and opened them. "No. That isn't true. I was trying to save myself. I knew it even then, I think, but I'd never have said so. I'd lost Courtney. I'd done everything I knew how to do and I'd lost her, and here was this baby, her baby, in half a duplex off Cleveland Avenue with a boy who loaded trucks, and I thought, I can do it right this time. I can get it back. All of it. As though you were a thing I'd dropped." She took off her glasses and let them fall on their chain. "Preston told me it would be easy. A twenty-year-old with no diploma. He said the boy would fold the minute we offered the trust. They always fold, he said. They always take the money."
"He didn't."
"He didn't." She almost smiled. "He stood up in that courtroom in that dreadful suit, with the lapels out to here, and the sleeves let down so far you could see the line, and that button, and I sat there with Preston beside me in a suit that cost more than the boy made in a month, and I thought, this is going to be very easy. And then Preston said what he said. And Stanley answered him. And I looked at the judge's face and I knew it was over. I knew it before the judge said a word. I'd lost in the first minute, and I didn't have the sense to know it until the boy told Preston his daughter was warm."
"Why did you go white," I said, "at the Palace?"