It was the answer a grandfather needed.

PART 5

I met Attorney Miriam Cole that Monday.

She was a family-law specialist with a desk full of neatly stacked folders and framed drawings from her own children on the wall.

She read Ray’s timeline and then asked me to put the papers aside.

“Tell me about Emma,” she said.

I was prepared to discuss fraud.

I was not prepared to describe Emma’s favorite ice cream, the way she arranged spelling words in alphabetical order even when the teacher didn’t ask, and how she’d recently insisted that all the animals in her drawings needed somewhere warm to sleep.