A girl's room with a bunk bed. A little girl on the top bunk, five or six years old, sitting up in pink pajamas with something printed on them, cartoon cats, holding a stuffed animal by one leg, not crying, just staring at the men in the doorway in their black vests.
"There was a little girl," he said.
"Desiree," said Antoinette Reddick. "She was five. She's twenty-seven now. She's a respiratory therapist at Boston Medical. She has a boy of her own who's four." She paused. "You told me I'd never see her again."
He did not remember saying it. He knew that he had said it. He knew because he had said it, or something like it, a hundred times, in a hundred hallways, to a hundred women whose boyfriends kept things in their closets. It was a thing you said. It was a lever, and you put your weight on it, and nine times in ten the woman cried and gave you the man, and the tenth time she didn't, and you charged her with what was in the closet, because it was in her closet, and because the law said you could, and because the next woman would hear about it.
"You didn't give me Sykes," he said slowly.
"I didn't give you Sykes."
"You did time."
"Three years," she said. "Mandatory minimum. Trafficking in a class B substance, fourteen to twenty-eight grams. It was twenty-two grams. It was his. I knew it was there; I'm not going to sit here and tell you I didn't know it was there. I knew there was something in that shoebox and I didn't open it, because I was twenty-six and I had a five-year-old and a man who paid half my rent, and I had decided that if I didn't open the box I didn't have to know. That's what I did. That's the whole of what I did." She looked at the corkboard. "I did my three years at Framingham. My mother raised Desiree for three years. And Antwan Sykes did eight months on a different case in Suffolk County and then got shot in Mattapan in 2009, so that worked out for everybody."
Maureen came in from the vestibule. Neal saw her stop just inside the inner doors and look at the two of them sitting there with the empty chair between them, and he saw her read his face from across the lobby, the way she could, and he saw her decide not to come over.
"Does Sean know?" he said.