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He picks up the folder and walks to the door. He doesn't slam it. He doesn't say goodbye. He simply leaves, and I stand alone in my kitchen, shaking, with the answer to my question still hanging in the air where he left it.

Chapter Forty

Ross

Idon't sleep that night. I sit in the suite on Nob Hill with the folder on the desk in front of me and read every page again, slowly this time, as if I were Blaire.

The house two streets away from my mother's.

The school that has already agreed to take them.

The travel schedule, the trusts, the line about her firm that I wrote as a kindness.

By the time the sky starts turning gray over the bay, I understand that every page is a decision I made alone, and that I made each one of them in the same voice my father used when he told me what my life would be.

I put the folder in the hotel safe and close the door on it.

That evening, I text her:

Ross: Can I come by after the boys are asleep? No folder. I just want to talk.

Her answer takes almost an hour.

Blaire: You can come around nine.

I arrive at her door at nine on the dot. She opens the door in a sweater with her arms folded, and she doesn't step aside right away. She looks at my hands first. They're empty. Only then does she let me in.

We sit at the kitchen table where I laid everything out the night before. I keep my hands flat on the wood between us.

"I'm not here to tell you anything," I say.

"I'm here to ask you three questions, and I'm going to listen to the answers without trying to fix them.” I pause for a moment and take a deep breath in between.

“ What do you want?”

“What do Wells and Miles need?”

“And what are you afraid of losing?"

She studies me as though she's waiting for the catch. When none comes, she lets out a slow breath.

"The boys need their lives to stay theirs," she says.

"They need to ride their bikes without someone following them. They need to be bad at things and good at things without anyone deciding what that means for the family. And they need me to still be their mother after your family gets through with all of this."

I nod. I don't speak.

"What am I afraid of losing?" She laughs once, without any humor in it.

"Being their parent. Really being it, not just signing forms after other people have decided things. Their ordinary childhood. My people, Erica and Hannah here, my parents in Naperville, Chloe in New York. Making a decision about my own children without a trustee in the room."

She pauses. "My work."

"Tell me about your work," I say.

"What would you be losing?"

"I'm a partner at Mercer & Vale," she says.