The machine in him turned over. Which of you wrote it. Which of you sat at a kitchen table with a spiral notebook. He looked at the cousins' hands.
Then he made himself stop looking.
Sheila Galvin came through the detector, and it went off for the cane, and Sandoval said, softly, "It's all right, ma'am, I know it's the cane," and did not wand her. She stood in the lobby and took in the room, the chairs, the urn, the corkboard, Maureen at the end of the row with her pocketbook, the DA's man rising to greet her. Her eyes passed over Neal the way they had passed over him every day for eleven days in 2012, without stopping. Then they found Antoinette Reddick, and stopped.
Antoinette stood up. She left the envelope on the chair. She crossed the lobby, not quickly, and Sheila Galvin let go of her daughter's arm and the two women took each other's hands, both hands, the way women do at a wake.
Neal could not hear what they said. He saw Sheila Galvin's lips move, and Antoinette nod, and nod again, and say something short. He saw Jada Galvin watch them with her arms folded across her fleece. Then Sheila Galvin let go and turned to the DA's man, and Antoinette came back across the lobby and sat down where she had been and picked up the envelope and put it on her knees.
"You know her," Neal said.
"I told you I did."
"How?"
"She called me," Antoinette said. "Two years ago. Through the victim services office at the Department. She'd been notified he was in the hospice program, it's in his file, and she wanted to know what that meant. What he did. Whether it was real or whether it was a thing men put on their parole packets." She looked down at her hands. "We had lunch. At the Bickford's on Belmont Street. I told her what he did. I told her about Cyril Mahoney. She cried and I cried and she paid for both of us, she wouldn't let me, and at the end of it she said, Thank you for telling me, Ms. Reddick, and I'm still going to stand up at that hearing and ask them to keep him." Antoinette smoothed the envelope. "And I said, Mrs. Galvin, I'd think less of you if you didn't."
Neal looked at Sheila Galvin, standing by the corkboard with the DA's man, reading the typed page with Sean's name on it. She had taken her glasses out of her coat pocket to read it. Her hand was shaking a little, holding them.