Aaron was Frank's right hand then, the way he still was, and he was the one Frank called when he decided how it was going to be handled.
Frank brought Teresa to a private clinic in Westchester, one of those places that didn't advertise, and Aaron drove them.
Frank handled the placement himself, with a couple he knew through a church group in Yonkers, and he paid them.
Aaron said the amount out loud, quietly, like he had been carrying the number around for almost thirty years and it had worn a groove in him.
Then Frank told Teresa the baby had died at birth.
I asked Aaron if that was really what Frank told her.
"That is what he told her," he said.
"I was standing in the hallway when he said it."
Aaron drove Teresa home from that clinic, and she cried the entire ride, and she never mentioned it again for the rest of her life.
Not when she got married.
Not when she moved to Astoria.
Not once.
I asked Aaron how a nineteen-year-old girl is supposed to carry something like that by herself for eight years, and he said she had her ways, and I did not like the sound of that answer.
I asked him who the father was.
He said Frank knew, and Frank made sure no one else ever would.
I told him that was not an answer, and I did not move, and I did not look away, and I think he understood that I was not going to leave that room without it.
Aaron stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his back to me.
Then he sat back down and said a name.
Ray Calloway.
I said the name back to him, because I wanted to hear it out loud in that room one time.
Aaron said Calloway worked for Delgado & Sons in the late nineties, doing consulting for Frank on the property side, and that he is now on the board of a bank in Manhattan, and that he has a wife and grown children and a house in Rye.
I asked him why I had never heard that name before.
"You have," Aaron said.
"You just never had a reason to remember it."
He was right.
I thought about it on the train ride back to Bayside, and I did remember the name, from years of paper in the office, from a line on a page I had scanned without reading.
I asked why Daniel had never been allowed to see the full trust.
Aaron did not answer that one right away.
He said that when Frank set up the trust the year before he died, there was a provision in it that had nothing to do with business, and that Frank had put it there because of 1997, and that it named a trustee who had to sign off on any claim against the estate.
I asked him who the trustee was.
He said he would tell me that on Friday at the meeting, if I was still willing to hold on to it until then.
I said I was willing, and I stood up, and he walked me to the door.
At the door he said one more thing, and it is the thing I have heard in my head every day since.
He said, "Claire, your husband has been a good son for thirty years.
That is not the same as being told the truth."
I walked out through the shop floor past men I have known for two decades and got in my car and sat in the parking lot on Vernon Boulevard without starting it for a while.
Then I called Daniel and told him to come home.
He asked me what Aaron had said and I told him I would tell him everything tonight, in the kitchen, and that I was not going to tell it twice.
He said, "I'm on my way."
I sat there looking at the warehouses across the street and understood that from tonight on I was not going to be the woman who waited to be told things.
I was going to be the one who went and read the paper myself.
The next morning I took the day off work and went to the Queens County clerk's office on Sutphin Boulevard instead.
I did not tell my office what it was for and I did not tell Daniel I was going.