commenting. Claire had not realized she had read the messages aloud until Mrs. Parker said, quietly, “A little late for that.”
They worked for forty-seven minutes in near silence, the only sounds the soft percussion of typing and her son’s occasional small sounds from the portable bassinet Mrs. Parker had borrowed from her neighbor the week before, kept in the hall closet without explanation, as if she had known something was coming.
By 7:18, Mrs. Parker had stopped describing what they were looking at as a mess. By 7:32, she called it an exposure risk. By 7:45, she picked up her phone and called a former colleague who had spent the last decade in corporate compliance, and said only, calmly, that she needed to route a preservation concern through the proper channel.
Claire fed the baby while she listened. Her son drank quietly, one small hand resting
