He looked down at the girl. She was looking up at him, and it was not a rhetorical question. She wanted to know. She was ten, and she had a ten-year-old's ferocious appetite for whether things were fair, and nobody around her had been able to tell her.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I think it was her right to refuse me. I'm less sure it was her right to refuse your mother." He was quiet a moment. "That's not mine to judge, though."
"Mom's the one who told the nurse to send you away," Ludie said.
He turned his head.
"Grandma didn't change her mind. She was waiting for you. She had her hair done. Miss Gaudet did it for her this morning, with a curling iron, and Grandma made her do it twice. And then Mom came in and saw the notebook and read the last page, and she went out in the hall, and I heard her tell Miss Gaudet that she's Grandma's power of attorney and Grandma isn't competent to make decisions about visitors and you weren't allowed in. And Miss Gaudet said Mrs. Ketterman seemed pretty clear to her, and Mom said, You don't know what this man did, and Miss Gaudet didn't say anything after that." Ludie took a shaky breath. "And then I went back in the room and Grandma was asleep. And I took the page out. I'm not supposed to tear pages out. It's a rule. But I saw you out the window, putting your helmet on."
"Ludie," he said. "Does your mother know you're out here?"
"No."
"Then we should fix that."
"If you go in, she'll make you leave."
"Then she'll make me leave," he said. "But I'm not going to sit out here hiding with her daughter. That's not right either."
Ludie studied him. "Are you going to tell on me about the page?"
"No," he said. "You are."
She considered that, and something in her face eased, as though this were the first sensible thing an adult had said to her all week.