She did it without ceremony. She did not look at Nathaniel. Eunice regarded her for a long second, and Lindsay braced for anything, and what came was small and exact.
"Thank you, Lindsay," Eunice said, and sat.
It was not forgiveness. Lindsay knew the difference by then. It was a woman using her correct name.
The signing took forty minutes. Abena Osei signed eleven times in a slow, beautiful hand. When it was done, the women of the board applauded, and then one of them began to sing, and then most of them were singing, a hymn Lindsay didn't know, and through the glass walls people stopped in the hallway with their coffee and watched, and nobody told anyone they were in the wrong room.
Afterward, Nathaniel drove his mother home himself. Somewhere on the Van Wyck she said, "That chair was too soft."
He laughed. "Yeah?"
"All those years I thought those chairs had to feel like something." She looked out at the traffic. "Felt like a chair. Felt like a nice chair somebody pulled out for me." She was quiet a mile. "That Corrigan girl."
"What about her?"
"Nothing. I'm watching her." His mother folded her hands on her bag. "So are you, I expect. Don't make a career of it."
"No, ma'am."