"Then you'd better come in," I said, "because I'm not doing properly on my porch in my bathrobe."
She hesitated. I think she'd planned for me to argue at the door. I think she had a version of this conversation in her head where I slammed it in her face, and she'd have that to use later. She hadn't planned for coffee.
They came in. I made them sit at the kitchen table, where the calculus had been the night before. I poured three cups without asking. Ottoline didn't touch hers. Radhika held hers in both hands like a hand warmer, even though it was sixty-eight degrees outside.
"Where is he?" Ottoline said.
"Asleep. He's seventeen. It's a teacher workday, there's no school. Show me the footage."
She opened the folio. Her hands, I noticed, were absolutely steady. Ottoline's hands are always steady. It was the corner of her mouth that gave her away, a tiny pull, as if a thread were attached to it.
The footage was from a camera mounted under the eave at the back corner of her house, aimed down the side yard toward her trash bins and the gate. It was night-vision, gray and grainy, with the time stamp in the corner. 22:51:40. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then a figure came into frame from the back of the yard, from our side, from the fence. It was tall, and it was in a hoodie, and when it turned toward the camera, the camera caught its face for maybe half a second, and it was, unmistakably, my son. He reached up over the top of the fence. He seemed to take hold of something from the other side, though from the camera's angle you couldn't see who or what was holding it out. He pulled it toward him and over: a big, soft, lumpy bag, like a laundry sack, pale in the night-vision. Something small and light dropped out of the top of it and fluttered down onto the Vandersloot side of the fence, onto the mulch. He didn't notice. He hitched the bag onto his shoulder and disappeared back the way he had come, over our side, into the dark.
The whole thing was nineteen seconds long.