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Alli had put it together with Jenny from HR, and Sam could see the two of them in every detail. The long table pushed against the wall. Piper’s shortbread on borrowed trays. Coffee in the good urns instead of the break room pots. Somebody had found a photograph of Leigh from a company dinner years ago and had it printed large and framed, and it sat on an easel near the windows where the light was best.

In the picture she was laughing at something off to the side. Sam had never seen her laugh like that in his life.

He wondered who took it. He wondered why he’d never asked her a single question that wasn’t about a calendar.

From the guest book sign-in, a hundred people, maybe more, had attended, so it was a good turnout. Leigh was cared about in this community.

The book club sat together in the second row. Six women, none of them under fifty, and all of them wrecked.

Sam went over and introduced himself and told them about the books, and a small woman in a purple cardigan sniffled into a ragged tissue.

“She hosted in September,” the woman said, her eyes bright with tears. “She made a lemon cake. She was terrible at cake.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She was proud of it anyway.”

He was still turning that over when Frankie appeared at his elbow with a cup of coffee she’d clearly stolen from the front of the line.

“This is nice. This is nicer than anything that’s ever happened in this building.”

They had all come. Zack was over by the windows with Lucy. Cooper and Jane were near the food, because Cooper was always near the food. Tate had driven the sandwiches over himself and now stood with his hands behind his back, looking like a man who didn’t know what to do at a party he wasn’t running. His fiancée, Cat, was standing next to him, speaking softly into his ear. Piper had done the baking and was currently crying quietly into a napkin by the coffee, which surprised no one. She had the softest heart of all of them.

“I need all of you for five minutes,” he said, his gaze searching for Alli. With everything going on, he wasn’t sure why it was so important that he see her. She was probably busy helping Jenny. “Something came up today.”

“Then we’ll talk,” Frankie said, giving him a searching look. She always knew when something was up. He couldn’t keep secrets from her. “I’ll gather the troops.”

They took the small conference room across the hall. Zack shut the door before joining them. Six of them around a table built for twelve, holding paper cups of coffee.

Sam laid out everything he’d learned this morning. He didn’t hold anything back, kept to the facts, and didn’t say what he was feeling about the old man at the moment. That could come later.

He kept it short, because that was the only way he could get through it. The condo. The photograph in the Agatha Christie. The shoebox in the bottom drawer with the booties and the bracelet and the curl of hair. The hospital bill from July of 1996 with Leigh’s name in the patient box and four days of nursery charges under it.

The room was quiet when he was done.

Then Piper said, “Oh, that son of a bitch.”

“We don’t know that,” Zack said. “Not for sure.”

“We absolutely know that,” she shot back. “Christ, are you defending him?”

“I’m not defending him,” Zack denied. “But all we know is that Leigh had a baby. That’s it. Everything else is just conjecture.”

“Zack.” Frankie set her cup down with a shake of her head. “Last year we found out he had a whole daughter in this town that none of us ever met. A year. That’s how long it’s been. And now his assistant of thirty years turns out to have had a baby she hid from everybody, and you want to wait for a DNA test before you form an opinion?”

“I want to be careful,” Zack said. “There’s a difference.”

“There’s really not.”

What got Sam, standing there, was that none of them were surprised. Not the way people are surprised. There was anger in the room, and there was disgust, and there was Piper crying again. But nobody said it couldn’t be true. Nobody in his entire family had a single second of doubt that their father was capable of it.

That’s the part that should be shocking. That none of us are shocked.

“I keep coming back to one thing,” Sam said. “If it was him, why keep her? Thirty years at the desk outside his office. Dad doesn’t sit with anything he’s done. He puts it out of the room. He wouldn’t look at that every day for thirty years.”

“Unless she wasn’t a reminder,” Cooper said. “Unless she was an arrangement.”

“Meaning what?”