and rice. Amparo told a long story about a boy in her class who had put a pencil eraser in his ear and had to go to the nurse, and Itzel asked whether the eraser came out, and Amparo said yes, but it was brown, and Itzel put down her fork and said, "Okay, that's enough of that story," and Leti laughed with her hand over her mouth. Bryony ate quickly with her eyes on her plate and asked to be excused before anyone else had finished. Leti said, "Of course, mija," the way she always said it to all three of them, and Bryony flinched very slightly at the word and went upstairs.
Barrett had seen that flinch before. He had seen it for three years. He had always thought it was a thirteen-year-old's flinch at being called anything at all.
He waited until ten. Amparo went down at eight-thirty after two chapters of a book about a girl who ran a hotel for monsters, and Itzel shut herself in her room with her calculus at nine, and the light under Bryony's door went off at nine-forty. Leti came down in her robe at ten to set the coffee maker for the morning, the way she did every night, and found him at the kitchen table where he had been for most of the evening, with two pieces of paper smoothed flat in front of him.
She saw the Meritrust envelope first. He watched her see it. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, a small woman with her hair down and her arms crossed over her robe, and her face did not change at all, and that was the worst part, that her face did not change; it went quiet in the way of someone who has been expecting a knock for a long time and has finally heard it.
"You went in my nightstand," she said.
"Yes."
"Okay." She came the rest of the way in. She did not sit. She went to the coffee maker and measured the coffee into the filter, four scoops, and poured the water in, and set the timer for five-forty-five, and he understood that she was doing it so that her hands would have something to do. When she was finished she turned around and leaned against the counter and looked at the yellow legal page beside the statement. She did not have to ask whose handwriting it was. "And your mother made you a list."
"My mother is not the point."
"Isn't she." It was not a question. She looked at him. "Go ahead. Ask me."
"Where did twenty thousand dollars come from, Leti."
"It came from a check."
"I can read that."