Sean stood up. He was not supposed to stand, Neal thought; nobody had told him to. He stood anyway, in his too-short sleeves, with his hands at his sides.
"Mrs. Galvin," he said. "I'm not going to ask you for anything. I just wanted to say his name to you once, standing up. Elijah Galvin. He told me to go home. I should have gone home." He sat down. "That's all, Madam Chair."
Rosado looked at him for a long moment over her silver-rimmed glasses. Then she said, for the record, that the board would take the matter under advisement and issue its decision in writing in due course, and that the parties would be notified, and that the hearing was concluded at twelve-fifty-one p.m. The correction officers came forward. Sean held out his wrists for the cuffs without being asked, and turned his head as they closed them, and looked at his mother, and then his father, and then down the row, and lifted two fingers from his cuffed hands toward Antoinette Reddick, and then he was gone through the side door, and the door hissed shut on its hydraulic arm.
Out in the lot, the sun had come through. The maples were so red in it they hurt to look at.
Maureen went to her car first. She said she needed to sit for a minute by herself, and that she would see him at home, and that he should drive carefully, and then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, in public, in front of the Parole Board, which she had not done in thirty-seven years, and walked away across the asphalt with her pocketbook over her arm.
Antoinette Reddick came out a few minutes after, with the tote bag on her shoulder, lighter now, and her keys in her hand. Her car was a green Corolla with a hospice parking permit hanging from the mirror and a child's car seat in the back, three spaces from Neal's truck. He had been standing beside the truck. He had not been waiting for her. He had been waiting for her.
She stopped a few feet away.
"You didn't have to do that," she said. "In there."
"I know."