Peter started with the procedure, said we were there informally, said nothing anyone said would be binding, and asked Emma to tell us why she believed she had a claim.
She didn't get dramatic about it.
She reached into the tote bag and set out three things on the table in a row like she'd been practicing.
A birth certificate with Teresa Delgado listed as the mother, dated August 1998, and no father listed.
A placement document, two pages, signed Frank Delgado, same blue ink, same flat F.
And a photograph of a young woman holding a baby on a couch I recognized, because it was the couch in Frank and Marion's living room before they replaced it.
"I was raised in Yonkers," Emma said.
"By a couple named the Ruizes.
My mother — my adoptive mother — died two years ago, and she left me a shoebox with all of this in it.
She told me before she died that she'd always known I would want it eventually."
Peter asked why she waited until now.
"Because Frank Delgado was still alive when I found the box," she said.
"And I didn't want to walk up to a sick old man and tell him I was his granddaughter.
I don't know what he did to deserve that.
I only know what my mother told me, which is that I was placed privately and that the family wanted it that way.
So I waited.
He died in March.
I filed in June."
She looked at Daniel then, first time, and said, "You're my uncle.
I'm not here to take the building from you.
I'm here because there's no other door into my own family except this one."
Daniel's chin came up and he tried to say something and couldn't.
Peter said we would need time to authenticate all three documents and Emma said that was fine and slid photocopies of everything across the table so we couldn't say we hadn't seen them.
Then her lawyer started asking about the trust, and about the schedule of trustees, and about whether Frank had ever named anyone to oversee claims against the estate, and I noticed Aaron Delgado go very still in his chair.
Peter said that was a question for another day and stood up, and everyone started gathering papers, and I was pulling my coat on when Aaron leaned over and said my name very quietly.
"Claire.
Stay a minute."
Daniel looked at me and I nodded at him to go ahead and wait in the hall.
The door clicked shut and Aaron stood by the window with his hands behind his back for maybe ten seconds before he said anything.
"Frank didn't place that child," he said.
I asked him what he meant.
He turned around and his face had changed, and this is a man I've known for nineteen years, a man who came to my wedding and to my father's funeral.
"Frank didn't place her," Aaron said again.
"He took her.
From Teresa.
In the hospital.
I drove them both home and Teresa cried the whole way and never said another word about it for the rest of her life, and I have kept quiet about that for twenty-seven years because Frank Delgado paid my mortgage."
The building hummed the way it always does.
I stood there holding my coat and understood that Aaron had not handed me a paper in that store.
He had handed me the truth, and now he was waiting to see what I would do with it.
I sat down in the chair Daniel had just left, and Aaron sat down across from me, and neither of us said anything for a moment.
The building hummed the way it always did, that low sound from the loading dock on Vernon Boulevard, and I remember thinking I had heard that sound a thousand times at company picnics and Christmas parties and never once thought about what it was covering.
"Start with 1997," I said.
Aaron nodded like he had been waiting for someone to ask him that for most of his life.
He told me that in the fall of 1997, Teresa Delgado was nineteen years old and came home to the house on Bayside Lane pregnant.
He said Frank asked her who the father was, and she would not say.
She would not say it that week, or the next, or at any point in the months that followed, no matter what Frank said to her.