Part Two: The Reckoning
Chapter Six: Samuel
The first month of Samuel's life was — for Lorie — the most exhausted and most alive she had ever been simultaneously.
She had cared for infants before. She knew the weight of them, the smell, the way they take over the entire atmosphere of a house with their smallness and their needs. She knew the two a.m. reality of a newborn, the way time loses its normal structure and becomes instead a series of feedings and changings and brief, precious sleeps.
But she had not been prepared for Samuel.
He was — she had no clinical explanation for this — extraordinarily alert. The nurses in the maternity ward had commented on it, the way he tracked faces from the earliest hours with a seriousness that was improbable in a newborn. He was expressive in the particular way of babies who have a lot they want to say before the words come. He fussed with clear purpose and stopped when addressed, as if the sound of a familiar voice was information he was processing.
He had James's chin. She noticed this and told herself it was irrelevant information.
Eliza came home from the hospital on Thursday. She walked into the house and went directly upstairs. She'd held Samuel exactly once since the birth — for a photo that Patricia had suggested before she'd appeared in the hospital without prior warning or invitation, standing at Eliza's bedside with Gerald, looking at the baby with the calculating warmth of people reassessing a situation. Eliza had held Samuel for the photo and then handed him back to the nurse.
She did not request him when they came home.
Lorie set up the nursery with the care she brought to everything. The mobile above the crib. The nightlight with the soft amber glow. The sound machine that ran all night. She organized the diapers and the formula and the small, implausible onesies that all infants wear and that manage to be simultaneously practical and heartbreaking in their smallness.
She spent Samuel's first night home sitting in the glider in the nursery, feeding him his two a.m. bottle, with the house completely quiet around them, and she talked to him.
She talked to him the way people talk to infants when no one is watching — as if the baby is entirely capable of understanding, which in a spiritual sense she believed he was.
"Samuel," she said, very quietly, in the amber-lit room. "I don't know everything that's happening here. But God told me you're my assignment. So I'm here. And I'm not leaving."
Samuel looked at her with the unfocused gravity of a newborn, and yawned.
"Fair enough," Lorie said.
James was there every morning before he left for work. He'd appear in the nursery doorway in his work clothes, already holding his coffee, and he'd look at Samuel with that expression that had no name and ask how the night had been. Lorie would give him the rundown — feedings, sleep windows, any concerns — and James would nod and then cross to the crib and talk to Samuel for a few minutes in a low voice that held the love of a father.
He was gentle with the baby in a way that came naturally, without effort. He held him properly without having to be shown twice. He changed diapers without complaint and without making it a performance of inconvenience. He sat in the glider sometimes in the evenings with Samuel on his chest, one large hand across the tiny back, and just — sat.
Eliza rarely came to the nursery.
The few times she did, it was brief. She'd stand in the doorway and look at Samuel with the expression of someone regarding a situation that doesn't match their expectations, and then she'd leave. She didn't pick him up. She didn't hold him. In the first three weeks of his life, Lorie could count on one hand the number of times Eliza Sidwell had held her son.
She didn't miss any.
She wrote it down. Every date, every time, every observation. She wrote it in the small notebook she kept in the locked drawer of her nightstand, the one James knew about and had asked her to keep.
She did not enjoy this part of her job. But she understood its necessity with the clarity of someone who has been told by the Spirit that a child's future is at stake.
On Samuel's one-month birthday, James came home early from work.
Lorie was in the nursery, sitting on the floor with Samuel on a play mat, talking to him about the mobile above his head and its various elements — she'd taken to narrating his entire environment to him, on the logic that language acquisition started now and also that she simply liked talking to him — when she heard James come up the stairs.
He appeared in the doorway, still in his jacket, and his face was doing something complex.
"Everything okay?" Lorie asked, because she could read the register of his moods by now with the accuracy of someone who has been paying close attention.
"He's one month old today," James said.
"I know," Lorie said.
James crouched down to Samuel's level. Samuel, who had been regarding the mobile with the focused intensity of a scientist, shifted his gaze to James and made a sound — not quite a word, not even close to a word, but a sound directed specifically at James with a recognizable quality to it.
James's face did the thing that had no name.
"Hey, bud," he said.
Samuel made the sound again.
"Yeah," James said. "I know."
Lorie looked away at the wall and told herself that it was entirely normal to have something in your throat watching this.
Later, after Samuel went down for the evening, James came and found Lorie in the kitchen where she was cleaning up from dinner. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, and she knew, without him saying anything, that something had happened today. Something financial. Something that would move things forward.
"It came through," he said.
She didn't ask what it was. She understood.
"How are you?" she asked instead.
He thought about it.
"Honestly?" he said. "I'm ready for the next chapter."
The call came on a Friday morning, seventeen days after Samuel's one-month birthday.
James was at work when his phone rang, and it was his attorney, Marcus, who delivered the news in the careful, level voice that Marcus used when news was not entirely unexpected but still deserved to be received properly.
Eliza had filed.
She'd been gone for three days — not answering calls, not responding to texts — and James had filed a police report on day two. And now, a day after that, papers had arrived at the house.
The divorce filing demanded forty percent of James's total wealth.
James sat in his car in the parking lot of the job site and looked at a fixed point on the windshield and breathed.
Then he called Marcus.
Marcus had been ready. More than ready. The response was filed before the week was out — agreeing to the divorce, because James had never wanted to remain in something that had become an extended act of mutual harm, and he had no interest in fighting her on that front. But the response also included documentation: Samuel's birth certificate, establishing James as the legal father. The blood work that established James was not the biological father. The documentation of Eliza's conduct during the marriage, the conception outside the marriage, and — this was the one that mattered, the one Marcus had built quietly and precisely from the beginning — the documentation that under the terms of the inheritance, and given the facts of the situation, Eliza was entitled to nothing.
Not the house. Not the accounts. Not the inheritance.
Nothing.
And then Marcus had included the documentation that Lorie had compiled — quiet, thorough, undeniable — of Eliza's failure to care for or bond with Samuel. The dates. The observations. The pattern.
The filing also included a request for full custody of Samuel James Sidwell.