Page 122 of Final Drive

“Before the complaint.”

“Yes.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I step back and let him in.

He doesn’t sit. He puts the folio on the desk and opens it. Inside is a stack of tabbed paper, and the top page is a copy of an amended designation registration form with my name on it and a signature at the bottom that isn’t mine.

“I’ve drafted a sworn statement,” he says. “It says that on the fourteenth of April four years ago I filed an amended designation for a sixteen-year-old, that the amendment was materially false, that I knew it was false when I filed it, and that she had no knowledge of the filing until she was eighteen.” He turns the page around so it faces me. “It says why. I’ve written the reason down. I won’t be reading it to you in this room, but it’s in there and it’s accurate.”

I look at the page but I don’t read it.

“You know what this does to you.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bar complaint. That’s your license.”

“It is,” he agrees. “It’ll go to grievance. Given the facts and given who I know, I expect a private reprimand and a very unpleasant year.” He says it the same as he’d say a filing deadline. “That’s the honest assessment. I’d rather you have it than a story about how I fell on a sword.”

“That’s not a sword. That’s a paper cut.”

“I’m aware of the difference.”

“Then why are you here?”

He straightens up. He’s fifty-three and he looks older than he did in April.

“Because I sat in a room three weeks ago and listened to Harrison Lockwood explain how he was going to end a girl’s eligibility to make his son come home,” he says. “And I agreed with him. I want you to know that. I sat there and I thought it was reasonable.” He looks at the folio instead of me. “It took me until the drive back to work out why it sounded so familiar.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m not asking you to forgive that. I’d think less of you.” He closes the folio. “The committee convenes at four. Whatever you decide about me afterward is yours.”

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“No. You didn’t.” He picks up the folio and puts it under his arm. “That’s rather the point.”

The hearing room is a hotel conference space with a folding partition and a coffee urn nobody’s touched. Seven people sit at a long table. Carmine at the end, not sitting with them. Bennett in the second row with his cap in his hands.

I’m not allowed in. Neither is Gray. We sit in two chairs in the corridor outside with the door shut, and I can hear the sound of my father’s voice through it but can’t make out a single word.

Gray doesn’t try to talk to me. He puts his hand palm up on his knee and leaves it there, and after a few minutes I put mine in it.

The hearing takes forty minutes.

The door opens at 4:41. My father comes out first and looks at the wall over my head instead of at me. His jaw is set in a shape I’ve seen in my own mirror. He walks past us down the corridor without a word.

Carmine comes out second.

“You’re certified,” she says. “Both of you. The committee accepted the statement, dismissed the challenge as moot, and asked me to inform the complainant’s counsel that the matter is closed.” She’s holding a single sheet of paper and her hand isn’t quite steady. “You race at nine-forty tomorrow.”

Gray’s breath goes out of him.

“What happens to him?” I ask.

“That’s the state bar’s business, not mine.” Carmine looks down the empty corridor after him. “He asked me one thing before he went in. He asked whether you’d be in the room. I told him no. He said good.”

She puts the sheet in my hand and heads for the elevators.