“Six weeks,” she said.

“Discovery, depositions, then the hearing.

You’ve got time.”

“Time for what, exactly?”

“Time to make up your mind how much of yourself you’ll let them see.” Helen looked at me over the top of the page.

“Because once that judge opens Walter’s statement, there’s no shutting it again.”

I thought about the back bedroom, where little Walter was sleeping through all of it in his blue blanket, and about the brass key on my key ring that had opened Walter’s front door for thirty years before it ever opened mine.

The phone rang at seven that evening.