darted to it. “Who are you calling?”
“Emergency services first, because my father needs to be checked. Then the police, because this is assault. Then my attorney, because your mother is holding opened legal mail taken from a locked room.”
The room changed temperature.
Camille reached for his arm. “Elias. Please. Don’t do this in anger.”
He looked at her hand until she withdrew it.
“I was angry before,” he said. “Now I’m careful.”
He dialed.
Beatrice’s polished calm cracked. “You would humiliate your wife over a misunderstanding?”
Elias looked at his father’s wet sleeves, the red mark beginning to rise along one cheek where his head must have struck the dryer, the tremor he was trying desperately to hide.
“Someone in this room should be humiliated,” Elias said. “It is not my father.”
While he spoke to the dispatcher, Camille stood very still with the folder against her ribs. Her eyes kept moving from Elias to the hallway, then to her purse on the counter. Grant noticed. Beatrice noticed. Arthur noticed.
The sirens had not yet begun in the distance when Elias ended the call.
“Put the folder on the table,” he said.
Camille shook her head. “No.”
That answer told him more than obedience would have.
“Eli,” Arthur said.
Elias turned.
His father’s gaze had gone to the side pocket of Camille’s purse. A corner of paper stuck out there. Pale blue, creased, as if shoved in quickly.
“Not that one,” Arthur said. “The other paper. The one from the clinic.”
Camille’s lips parted.
Elias felt his pulse slow.
“What clinic?”
Camille hugged the folder tighter. “Your father has been spying on me.”
“What clinic?” Elias repeated.
Beatrice said, “Camille, maybe we should wait for counsel.”
Counsel.
Not a doctor. Not family. Counsel.
Elias looked at his wife. In the past year, their marriage had become a series of polished surfaces. Video calls cut short because she was tired. Missed messages she blamed on time zones. A nursery catalog he found open on her laptop before deployment, though they had agreed to wait. Then, two months ago, a strange charge on the credit card from a private clinic in Fairhaven. When he asked, Camille said it was for hormone testing, nothing serious, and then she cried because he had questioned her from an ocean away.
He had apologized.
The memory burned.
Arthur swallowed. “She received a letter three days ago. I saw the envelope on the hall table. Fairhaven Reproductive Center. She hid it when I came in. Later I heard her arguing with her mother. She said if the timing came out, everything would be ruined.”
Camille’s voice cut like glass. “You miserable old man.”
Elias stepped between them.
“Do not speak to him.”
She laughed once, wet and sharp. “Of course. Of course he gets to poison you against me and I’m the villain.”
“Open your purse.”
“No.”
“Then the officers can do it when they arrive.”
Her face hardened. “You don’t want them seeing what’s in there.”
A different kind of silence followed.
Elias could hear the refrigerator hum. Somewhere upstairs, a faucet dripped. Outside, a delivery truck passed slowly, its brakes squealing at the corner.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
Camille’s eyes shone now, but there was no softness in them. “It means
