Chapter 48: Supervised Contact
The letter came by hand on Monday the nineteenth at twenty to five.
Family office letterhead. Two pages. Signed by Mr. Foyle, for and on behalf of, and copied to E. Trask.
I read it in the passage between the estate office and the gun room, where I had ambushed Victor Blackwood three weeks earlier.
One. The suspension continues pending conclusion of the external matter. Unchanged.
Two. Accommodation relocated to the coach house, effective 20 October.
Three. Contact with the child limited to one hour daily, between ten and eleven in the morning, in the presence of the appointed nurse.
Four. No access to the second floor outside that hour.
Five. Acknowledgment requested in writing by Tuesday.
One hour. Down from four.
Down, in five weeks, from every night since the fourth of August 2025.
Nothing in the letter is unreasonable and nothing in it names anybody.
No sentence in it could be read to a stranger and sound like anything but a household being careful.
Then I turned to the enclosure.
It was a copy of the consent form. Executed.
Victor Blackwood had signed it on the sixteenth of October, in his own hand, with the date beside it, as Dr. Moreno had asked.
Overnight oximetry, five consecutive nights. Blood draw within two hours of an episode.
Specimens held. Transport clause agreed.
He had signed all four boxes.
He had done the thing I had spent three weeks asking for.
Paragraph four had a line through it and two initials in the margin.
Struck. Replaced with a typed rider pasted at the foot of the page.
The five nights shall be consecutive, on dates to be agreed with the household.
The study would happen.
A machine would sample a child’s oxygen every two seconds for five nights, and no part of that would care what anybody wanted.
And it would run on five nights chosen by the people who live in the house.
Paragraph four was the only sentence in four pages that contained my table.
It was queried on the first of October and gone by the sixteenth.
That is not proof of anything either.
A lawyer struck a paragraph he thought was an accusation dressed as a protocol, and he may have been right about that.
I telephoned Wabash at half past five and read the rider out to Dr. Moreno twice.
He was quiet for eight seconds.
“I will run it,” he said. “A machine’s data has no motive. That is still worth having.”
“But you can’t test the column.”
“I cannot test your column. Not with five nights chosen by the household.”
“So what does it prove?”
“It proves what happens to that child on five nights,” he said. “That is not nothing. It is simply not the question you asked in September.”
Then he said: “Get me a date. Any date. The moment you know which five nights, telephone me, whatever hour it is.”
I telephoned Constance Blackwood at twenty to twelve that night, from the boot room, with the card gone soft at the corners.
She answered on the second ring and did not sound as though she had been asleep.
She was pleased to hear me, and she asked about my side before she asked about anything else.
I read her the letter. Then I read her the rider.
“He signed it,” she said. “Lily, he signed it. I told you a man like my son cannot hear a description. You gave him a number, and he signed it.”
I said that they had cut the only paragraph that mattered.
“Then we will put it back,” she said. “Not tonight. Don’t sign anything tonight, dear. Nothing improves after midnight.”
I laughed, because she meant me to.
“I shall speak to Victor properly after the twenty-fourth,” she said. “There is no reasoning with anybody in that house before the twenty-fourth.”
After the twenty-fourth. Five days.
Everything in that house was now waiting behind a wedding, and it had been arranged so gently that I thanked her.
I signed the acknowledgment on Tuesday at nine and kept a copy, dated.
I moved in two trips. The boxes from September had never been unpacked, which was the only efficient thing I did that autumn.
At ten I had my hour. He put a seventh block on a tower and looked at me.
Miss Devlin wrote the time in the book. At 11:00 I signed out.
At half past eight that evening the second-floor code changed.
I did not have the new one and did not ask, because asking would have put a line in a book.
From the coach-house window you can see the nursery.
Second window from the left on the first floor. The curtain is the one Ana Reyes-Blackwood chose in 2025.
You cannot hear anything from there. Not a boiler, not a truck, not a child.
I checked at two in the morning, and again at ten past three.
Both times the window was dark, and both times I wrote down the time, because it was the only thing left that I was allowed to record.