When I came out of court, Nico was sitting on a bench with a bag of chips open between his knees.
“You came.”
“Amelia told me where to wait.”
“Did you hear it?”
“No. I was out here.” He folded the top of the bag. “Did you want me in there?”
I thought about the question.
“I want you to know I answered. I don't need you to have watched.”
“Good. I didn't know whether I could do that bit.”
He stood and offered the bag. I took a chip. It tasted of vinegar and the inside of a school lunch box. I realized I was hungry enough to be shaking.
We waited for Amelia beside a radiator that had been painted shut. People passed in both directions. Some looked at me, then looked again. Nico moved so that the wall was behind us and the public corridor in front.
“Don't become my bodyguard,” I said.
“I'm standing.”
He stayed where he was.
At the far end of the corridor a door opened. Soto came out with his lawyer, a woman carrying a flat black case. She said something to him without looking up. He nodded.
He was not wearing the knit cap. Without it, in a suit, he was the witness I had failed to recognize for most of a trial. Clean collar. Soft shoulders. A man who knew where to put his hands when nobody was asking him to do anything with them.
Nico followed my gaze.
“Is that him?”
“Yes.”
Soto saw us. He slowed by half a step, then kept walking beside his lawyer. He did not smile. He did not threaten us. He looked at my son as if he were checking the completion of a job.
Nico put the chips down on the bench.
“Don't,” I said.
“I'm not going to hit him.”
He watched until the elevator doors shut.
“I thought I'd remember something.”
“You were two.”
“I know. But I thought there'd be something. A face. A sound.”
He picked the bag up again, folding it badly this time.
“That's worse, somehow. He knows something about me I don't get to know.”
I did not tell him he was safe from that. I stood beside him until Amelia came.
Amelia did not bring us a dramatic account of what Soto had said. Through his lawyer he had asserted his privilege against self-incrimination on matters the court proposed to examine. There were limits and arguments around that too. Invoking a right was not a confession.
“I know you want it to count as an answer,” she told me in the taxi. “It doesn't supply the missing proof.”
“Then what does?” Nico asked.
“Evidence obtained properly. And time.”
He leaned his head against the window.
“Time. Great. Anyone know where to order it?”
Amelia smiled, briefly, then looked at me.
“There's something you're entitled to see in the hearing materials.”
She showed me a photograph on her tablet after we got to her office. It was an exhibit from the contact investigation, not something a friendly officer had slipped her.
A desk. A printer. Four photographs spread beside a keyboard.
Owen outside his building. Ruth by the bus stop. Leon lifting the shutter on one of his shops.
And me entering the courthouse. The coat was mine. The flat black bag was mine. Someone had enlarged my face until it became soft and speckled.
Next to it was a copy of an old identity document.
I knew the haircut in that photograph. I had done it myself with kitchen scissors. Nico had cried at the sound close to his ear.
“It was among materials seized from Marin's office,” Amelia said. “Soto retained copies of passengers' identification in his old transport files. The messages with this attachment describe him spotting you in the jury box during his first day of testimony. Marin compared the courthouse photograph with the Galvez copy. They identified you after selection. They didn't put you on the jury.”
Another exhibit was a saved outgoing message from Marin's account to the blogger: my current name, Galvez and the enlarged courthouse picture. The posted image had the same crop. My old name had not walked out of a public order.
My old name was legible beneath the face.
Mira Galvez.
I had carried that name out of one country and into three others. At some point I had begun to think that leaving a name behind meant nobody could still have the paper.
Nico stood beside my chair.
“That's the picture in our brown envelope.”
“Yes.”
“I thought we had the only one.”
“So did I.”
He bent closer. “Your hair was terrible.”
I laughed once, and then could not stop. It was not because the joke was that good. He looked startled, then relieved. Amelia put the tablet facedown and let the laugh run out.
When I could breathe, I asked her to show it to me again.
Owen's rent payment appeared in the contact evidence too. It led through a contractor to Arrival House. My photograph was beside the photographs of the people Marin had approached. He had needed to find us, to follow ordinary routes and ask ordinary people for things they could refuse.
There was a travel confirmation in the same disclosed set. One passenger, Soto's passport name, December second. No return leg. Beside it, a message from Soto to Marin dated before the last day of trial: The chair waits for the case to finish. Keep it open until I'm gone.
I asked Amelia to put the committee notice beside it. She opened the one I had sent her.
“A guilty verdict would have ended the chair's excuse,” I said. “So would an acquittal.”
“That is what the chair had announced. These messages are evidence of what Soto expected him to do. Not a guarantee that anyone would have let Soto travel.”
Nico read the date. “December second. He was just going to go.”
“That was the booking,” Amelia said.
On another page was the number that had sent the photograph of Nico. The account records linked it to the handset collected when Marin was arrested. I made myself look at that page too, although the picture was not in this exhibit. The time matched the call I had made to the officer.
“What part of the ID is public?” Nico asked.
Amelia checked the exhibit version against the material provided to her. Identifying numbers and unrelated details were subject to the court's protections. The unredacted record was not a photograph for anybody to download.
“If they publish it anyway?” he asked.
“We deal with that if it happens. I won't promise a thing I can't control.”
I made her show me which version the public could see. My own name remained. The numbers that could be used for other purposes did not.
“Keep asking that,” I told Nico. “You don't have to stop because it's about me.”
Nico put a hand on the back of my chair.
“Come home,” he said. “The rice is going to be one block by now.”
“You cooked?”
“I started a thing. You can stop it being evidence.”
We went home together.