The clerk's office on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice still has the paper cutter smell, that fresh-toner-and-hot-plastic smell of something run off a machine in the last hour, and Verity hands it to me without preamble, without a greeting, standing in the hallway because the benches outside courtroom 4C are full of people waiting on custody matters that have nothing to do with either of us.

"I'm sorry," she says, which from Verity Boone is close to a scream. "I wanted you to have it before you heard it secondhand."

In re the Estate of Julian Winthrop Ashford. Serif type, a caption box, a case number stamped in San Mateo County that morning. Petition for Determination of Heirship.

I read it standing up because there's nowhere to sit.

The hallway does something strange almost immediately — not a spin, nothing so honest as a spin, just a slow lengthening, the fluorescent tube overhead stretching at both ends like the whole corridor is being pulled taffy-thin, and the black serif letters on the page seem to float half an inch off the paper, printed twice, badly aligned, until I blink hard enough to force them back into one layer.

Putative father Julian Ashford, deceased August 3, 2018.

Petitioner respectfully requests genetic testing of the minor child, upon birth, to resolve any doubt as to paternity.

Heir. The word sits in the middle of the page like something that crawled there on its own.

"He died in 2018," I say. Out loud. To Verity, to the hallway, to nobody, the way you'd say a wrong number on a receipt hoping saying it makes the register correct itself. "Julian died seven years and four months ago." I do the arithmetic again anyway, out loud, a second time, as if repetition were a kind of proof. "This baby was conceived in April. This year. April eighth."

Verity doesn't argue the math. Nobody has to argue the math. That's the part my brain keeps snagging on, over and over, a groove worn into a record — the math is not the point, the math was never going to be the point, and some very stupid, very tired part of me keeps expecting the math to matter anyway.

"He knows the dates don't work," Verity says. She's got the blazer on, brown corduroy gone shiny at the elbows, four pens racked in the breast pocket by height like she lined them up with a ruler. "He's not filing this to win paternity, Maya. He's filing it to lose it slowly."

"That's not a sentence that means anything."

"It means every hearing on this petition is a hearing where his lawyers get to ask you questions under oath that have nothing to do with Klepfisz's case and everything to do with your credibility in it. Every request for medical records is a chance to catch a date that doesn't match another date. He is building a record, in a separate courthouse, in a separate county, that says Mei-Lin Zhao is careless with the truth about parentage. And then somebody photocopies that record and walks it across the bridge and hands it to whoever's cross-examining you at trial."

The hallway does the taffy-stretch thing again. I put one palm flat against the wall — cool institutional paint, government beige, decades of hands doing exactly this — and press until I feel my fingertips go bloodless against the plaster.

"There's a second reason," Verity says, and her voice has dropped the register she uses for bad news that's still survivable, into the one she uses for the other kind. "An heir petition creates what's called a colorable interest in the child. A legal foothold. It doesn't have to succeed to exist. It just has to be pending."

"So?"

"So you pled to a count that carries custodial time on the guidelines, even with cooperation credit. If a judge ever has to ask who holds guardianship while you serve it — this is already in the file, waiting. He's not trying to be the father, Maya." She says it slow, like she's translating out of a language I don't want to learn. "He's trying to be the alternative."

The word alternative does something the word heir couldn't quite manage. My vision goes grey at the edges first, a photo underexposing itself frame by frame, and the hallway telescopes — the exit sign at the far end suddenly impossibly small and impossibly far, like I'm looking at it down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, and a high thin tone starts up in my ears that I have to talk over just to hear myself think.

I sit down.

Not gracefully. I go down the wall, palm dragging the paint, until I'm on the floor with my knees up as far as thirty-three weeks lets them go and the petition still gripped in one hand, corner of the page bending against the linoleum.

A bailiff — young, crew cut, the kind of face that's had this exact training module — crouches down without touching me and comes back thirty seconds later with a paper cone of water from the cooler by the elevators. I drink it because it's easier than arguing with him about whether I need it.

"Ma'am, I can call—"

"No paramedics," I say, and hear how flat my own voice has gone, filed down to the bone. "I'm pregnant, not dying. I just need the floor for a minute."

He looks at Verity like she might override me. Verity, God love her, just shakes her head once, and he backs off to hover by the water cooler instead, close enough to feel useful, far enough not to be looked at, which is its own kind of mercy.

I count. Not primes, not yet — first I just breathe, four counts in, four counts out, watching the exit sign resolve back to its actual size fifty feet away. Then, when that isn't enough, I start the numbers. Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. My scalp along the hairline pulls tight, the old seam of scar drawing up like a zipper being tested, and I let it, because it's a feeling I know the shape of, at least, which is more than I can say for the paper in my hand.

Kai finds us like that.

He comes off the elevator still in the charcoal suit from whatever deposition Sloane's lawyers dragged him into this morning, tie loosened but not off, and his right hand is taped — not bandaged, taped, three knuckles wrapped in white athletic tape gone slightly grey at the edges, five days out from a trophy case in Woodside. He sees me on the floor before he sees Verity, and something in his face does the thing it did in that library, the thing where the whole architecture of him resets around a single fact.

"What happened." Not a question. He's already crouching, careful, a foot of air between us, hands where I can see them.

"Nothing happened to me," I say, which is a lie so small it barely counts, and hand him the petition instead of an explanation.

He reads standing, then reads again crouching, and I watch his jaw work through it the way it works through everything — a problem first, a person second, always, it's the flaw and the gift in the same muscle — and by the third page his thumb is already moving on his phone, drafting, the tell-tale hunch of a man composing something in his head before his hands catch up.

"I'm putting together a response outlining the timeline discrepancy for Verity to file, we can attach the ultrasound records, the—"

I take the phone out of his hand. Gently. Firmly. Both.

"Not everything is a memo, Kai."

He looks at me like I've slapped the reflex right out of him, which, fair, I basically have. His mouth opens, some argument already loaded, and then he looks down at his own taped knuckles and doesn't say it.

"Okay," he says instead, quiet. "Okay."

Outside, Bryant Street is doing its grey November thing, buses grinding, a food truck's generator whining somewhere out of sight, and the black sedan is at the kerb before we've even cleared the steps — parked in the loading zone like it belongs there, hazards off, engine off.

Desmond Fairweather stands by the rear door in the driving gloves, holding it open for a passenger who does not exist, nobody getting in, nobody getting out, the door simply open the way a mouth stays open on an unfinished sentence.

He doesn't come toward us. He doesn't need to. Fifty-one years old and built like something poured rather than born, he just waits until we're within range of an ordinary speaking voice, and says one sentence, evenly, the way you'd read out a weather forecast.

"He'd like you to know the offer of the house in Sausalito still stands."

Then he closes the door — on nothing, on air — and walks around to the driver's side, and the car pulls away from the kerb without hurry, merging into traffic like it was never anything but a car.

I don't answer him. There's no answer that isn't a door I don't intend to walk back through, not that house, not that kitchen, not that hexagonal tile, and he knows that, which is exactly why he said it. It isn't an offer. It's a location pin dropped on a map of what he thinks I'm worth.

My wrist aches, the old fracture, the cold finding the badly-set bone the way it always does this time of year, and I cup it in my other palm without deciding to, an old bird held wrong.

Klepfisz calls forty minutes later, while we're still parked in the structure two blocks over, and Verity puts him on speaker between the three of us with the windows fogging from three people breathing in a cold car.

"Say that again," he says, when Verity reads him the caption line, and I can hear him actually stop chewing his gum for a second, which might be the most alarmed I've ever heard him sound. Then, a beat later, something shifts in his voice — not relief exactly, but the sound of a man recalculating a spreadsheet in his head and liking the new total better than the old one.

"This is good," he says.

"Excuse me?"

"Not for you. For the case." Gum, back in motion. "Everything that man's ever done to you has been a phone call, a voicemail, a driver holding a door. Untraceable, unsigned, deniable. This—" a paper rustle I can hear even through the phone, Verity must be holding it up on her end "—this has his name on a signature block, notarized, filed with a county clerk, timestamped this morning. It's the first thing in eleven years he's put his own hand to. I can use a filed petition. I can't use a feeling in your gut."

"He's using it to make me look unstable before your trial," I say. "Verity already explained the mechanics."

"He's doing that too," Klepfisz agrees, easy, like both things can be true and only one of them is his problem. "But it cuts both ways, and I get the sharp end. Consciousness of guilt. A man doesn't reach for custody of a baby he thinks isn't real family unless he's worried about something else entirely."

I don't say anything to that. There isn't a version of thank you that fits in my mouth right now, and there isn't a version of screw you either, not for the man who's the only reason I have any ground left to stand on, so I just look out through the fogged windshield at the concrete pillar with a faded number 4 painted on it and let him and Verity work out logistics without me for a minute.

When the call ends, Kai sits with both hands on the wheel he isn't driving anywhere, staring at the same painted number 4, and after a while he says, without looking at me, "May I put my hand there." A small tilt of his chin toward the curve under my ribs where thirty-three weeks of somebody has taken up permanent residence.

"Yes."

He does. Warm, even through the coat, even through the cold that's gotten into the car along with everything else today, and neither of us says anything else for twenty minutes. The parking structure hums its fluorescent hum. Somewhere above us a car alarm goes off and stops. I watch his taped knuckles rise and fall very slightly with my own breathing, and think, absurdly, that this is the only paperwork today that hasn't been used against anybody.

That night I do the one thing that's actually mine to do.

I call San Francisco General's pre-admission line from my kitchen counter, the phone cord of habit still making me stand rather than sit, and I register under Mei-Lin Zhao, spell it twice for the woman on the other end, and when she asks for a next of kin to list on the chart I say, "No one," and let the silence after that answer the follow-up question she doesn't get to ask.

December happens the way water finds a drain — slow, then all at once, then gone.

On the second, the heirship hearing gets continued to January, a single line on a docket sheet that costs Verity forty minutes of argument and buys me nothing but time I don't feel any safer for having.

On the sixth, Priya comes over with a flat-pack crib box under one arm and her orange reading glasses pushed up into her braid, and we spend three hours on the studio floor with an Allen wrench and bad instructions translated badly from another language, and she doesn't ask about the petition once, and that, somehow, is the kindest thing anyone does for me all month.

On the fifteenth, the Mansfield Dynamic board — Sloane's board, now, in every way that matters — suspends Kai's operating authority pending resolution of the litigation hold and the grand jury matter, effective immediately, no vote required under some bylaw nobody outside that room has ever read out loud before.

On the nineteenth, Constance Ashford's declaration is filed under seal, four pages, and Verity tells me over the phone that Constance used the word credible about me eleven times and the word coerced about herself exactly once, and I sit with that trade for a long time after we hang up.

On the twenty-first, at thirty-six weeks against the chart's count, I go in with false labor — real enough to hurt, false enough to send me home again four hours later with a pamphlet about hydration and a look from the triage nurse that says soon, but not yet.*

And then it's the twenty-seventh of December, five-ten in the morning, and I am standing on the cold linoleum of my own kitchen floor in the grey dark before the streetlight outside cuts off, reaching for the kettle out of nine years of pure habit —

when the floor goes warm and wet under my bare feet, all at once, no warning at all.