Page 30 of The Lion in the Library

He was quiet for a moment. “Hunter gave me her name. I met with her this morning. She has a clear picture of the legal situation and a specific approach — documentation, coordinated response, nothing aggressive unless they move first.” He met my eyes directly. “She needs your lawyer to call her office. It’s your case. I can’t do this without you.”

“Leo.” I turned the water glass in my hands. “I have been managing my own legal affairs and my children’s welfare for three years. I have a lawyer. I have a plan.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need to be rescued.”

“I know that too.” He said it without defensiveness, which made it harder to argue with. “Estrella, I didn’t do this to rescue you. I did it because I was sitting in a room with Jorge Mendez last night, shaking his hand, watching him do what he came to do, and there was nothing I could do about it in that moment. So I did the thing I could do after.” He paused. “Maria Santos is very good. She’s worked with complicated parties before. But it’s your decision entirely.”

I looked at him across my kitchen table. This man who made pasta with my children and asked follow-up questions about toy cars and sat at my kitchen table writing things in a notebook, looking up when I came home with an expression that I had been trying, with limited success, not to interpret too precisely.

“Roberto’s lawyer is going to send a letter,” I said. “Probably in the next few weeks, once he’s had time to brief them. My lawyer has been on notice since the morning of his call, but she doesn’t have the specific experience with⁠—“

“Maria Santos has handled cases exactly like this,” Leo said. “That’s the whole reason I went to her specifically.”

“I’m not paying you back,” I said. “I want to be clear about that. Whatever the fees are, I’m not⁠—“

“I know.”

“Leo—”

“Estrella.” He said it with a patience that was not the patience of someone being tolerant, but of someone who had thought about this and arrived somewhere solid. “Let me do this one thing. Not instead of you. Alongside you.” He turned his hands palm-up on the table. “That’s all I’m asking.”

I had been managing alone for three years. I had become, in those three years, very good at it. I had also become, somewhere along the way, confused about whether needing help was the same as being weak. My mother had been trying to tell me this for some time. I had not, until recently, been ready to hear it.

“I’ll have my lawyer call her tomorrow morning,” I said.

Something in his shoulders settled. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Just make sure she’s actually as good as Hunter says she is.”

“Hunter is many things,” Leo said. “Inaccurate about lawyers is not one of them.”

Roberto’s lawyer sent a letter seventeen days later. Maria Santos responded within forty-eight hours. Her response, which my lawyer read to me over the telephone, was three pages long, calm in tone, and contained eleven footnotes, all of them pointing to documented facts about Roberto Salinas’s history of contact with his daughter.

Roberto did not send a second letter.

Jorge never engaged a lawyer at all. He sent one message through his publicist — a carefully worded thing about “respecting Estrella’s privacy during a transitional time” — that was so obviously a retreat dressed as graciousness that Miguel actually laughed when he read it.

“He looked at the numbers,” Miguel said, with the satisfaction of a man who understood exactly what had happened. “Maria Santos’s reputation. The documentation. The fact that Leo Ramirez signing with the Aztecs is going to generate a level of press that makes any custody dispute very uncomfortable for parties who don’t want scrutiny.” He folded the message and set it aside. “Jorge likes attention. He does not like this kind of attention.”

“I don’t especially care why he stopped,” I said. “Only that he did.”

Miguel gave me a look that was, for him, almost gentle. “You’re all right, Estrella.”

“I’ve been all right for three years,” I said. “I’m better now.”

The night the Aztecs announced the official signing, Leo arrived with champagne.

Not extravagant champagne — not the kind that came in a velvet case with a card attached, not the kind that announced itself as a gesture. Just a good bottle, chosen with care, carried under one arm, with sparkling cider for the children tucked under the other because of course he had thought about the children.

Pedro saw the cider bottle and immediately requested a toast. He had recently developed strong opinions about toasts and felt they were underutilized in daily life. Luz agreed with this assessment and began, without being asked, to locate appropriate glasses.

We ate dinner, the four of us, at the small kitchen table. Leo told the children about the Aztecs — the training facility, the other players, the fact that the stadium had significantly better parking than the one in Madrid, which Luz found funnier than I expected. Pedro had questions about the team bus, specifically whether it had cup holders. It did, Leo confirmed. This was satisfying.

After dinner, after the children had been convinced that a special occasion did not, in fact, exempt one from normal bedtime procedures — this took some time and involved a brief constitutional argument from Pedro that I suspect he had been developing for a while — I came back to the living room.

The champagne was on the coffee table, two glasses already poured, catching the light from the lamp.