Chapter 7: The Name I Didn't Recognize
The CPS worker's name was Ms.
Okafor.
She came to Grandma's house four days later, on a Tuesday afternoon, and she had a way of sitting very still that made you feel like she had all the time in the world.
She talked to Dad first, in the living room, while Grandma kept me in the kitchen.
Then she talked to Grandma.
Then she came to the kitchen doorway and asked if I'd like to talk with her while Grandma made tea.
I said okay.
She sat across from me at the kitchen table and put a small notebook on the surface — not to write in, just to have there — and she looked at me the way adults rarely looked at me.
Like what I said was going to matter.
"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," she said.
"And you can stop whenever you want."
"Okay," I said.
"Can you tell me about the night with the balcony?"
I told her.
She didn't interrupt.
She didn't write anything down.
She just listened.
When I finished, she asked, "Had anything like that happened before?"
I told her about the corner.
About the dinner in the trash.
About what Karen had said about my mom.
Ms.
Okafor's expression didn't change much.
But her pen moved once, briefly.
"Is there anything else you want me to know?" she asked.
I thought about the look Karen had given me across the room.
The promise in it.
"She asked me to lie," I said.
"At lunch, before we left.
She said I should tell you it only happened once."
Ms.
Okafor wrote something down.
"Thank you for telling me that," she said.
She stayed another hour.
When she left, she shook my father's hand and said she'd be in touch within the week.
She didn't tell us what was going to happen.
But she took the green notebook with her — Grandma had made a copy first — and she took the printed email.
Three days after that, Dad got a call.
Karen had hired a lawyer.
The lawyer's name was Gerald Fitch, and he had apparently called Ms.
Okafor's supervisor to raise concerns about the objectivity of the investigation.
He had also sent Dad a letter — formal, dense with legal language — suggesting that the notebook represented a pattern of interference by my grandmother in the marriage, and that the email I had sent from school had been coached.
Dad read the letter at the kitchen table.
He read it twice.
Then he set it down and looked at Grandma.
"She moved fast," he said.
"She always does," Grandma said.
"The name she mentioned on the phone," Dad said.
"When we were leaving.
Did you hear it?"
Grandma nodded slowly.
"I was by the car.
I heard it."
"Do you know who that is?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"I know the family," she said.
"His father was a judge.
Retired now.
Gerald Fitch clerked for him twenty years ago." She paused.
"Karen grew up two streets over from that family.
She's known Gerald Fitch since she was nineteen years old."
Dad sat back.
"She had him ready," he said.
"She's been ready," Grandma said.
"I think she's been ready for longer than we know."
I was sitting at the counter with a book I wasn't reading.
I thought about the name Karen had said into the phone.
The one I hadn't recognized.
*Gerald.*
I hadn't known what it meant then.
I was beginning to understand now.
But what none of us knew — not Dad, not Grandma, not Ms.
May you like
Okafor — was that Gerald Fitch had a file in his office that Karen had started building eight months before the night on the balcony.
And inside that file was a document with my mother's name on it.
