Maureen came in at five past nine, in the gray wool coat she had bought for Sean's sentencing in 2012 and worn, as far as Neal knew, only to things that had to do with Sean since. She had driven separately from the hairdresser, who had opened early for her as a favor, and her hair was set in the soft silver helmet she had worn for thirty years and her lipstick was on and her eyes were dry, which meant she had done her crying in the car. She came through the detector and it went off, and she said, "Oh, for God's sake, it's the hip," and Sandoval said, "Yes, ma'am, happens all day," and waved the wand over her and let her through.
She saw Neal and came to him and put her hand flat on the middle of his chest, which was what she did instead of kissing him in public, and looked up at his face. Then she looked past him at the woman in the chair by the door, and back at him.
"What did you do," she said. Not a question.
"Nothing."
"Neal."
"I'll tell you outside."
They went out to the vestibule between the two sets of glass doors, which was the only place in the building that was not the lobby or the hearing room, a box of glass and rubber matting about the size of an elevator, smelling of wet leaves and floor wax. Through the outer glass the maples burned in the lot. Through the inner glass he could see Antoinette Reddick with her head bent again over the envelope, and the beads of her glasses chain catching the light.
He told Maureen. He told it straight, because he had been married to her for thirty-seven years and there was no point telling it any other way. The docket, the picture, the look, the letter. The badge. He did not say that he had held the badge at her eye level. He did not have to. Maureen had seen him do it to a teenager in a Friendly's in 1994, over a matter of a stolen tip jar, and had not spoken to him for the length of the drive home, which was twenty minutes.
"You showed her your badge," she said.
"I said I apologized."