Stepmother Beats Poor Waitress For Feeding Stray Dog — The Mafia Boss Saw Her Scars & Takes Action

Chapter 9

Wilder Ashgrove came to the office at the docks the following morning with a thin file and placed it on the desk. But he didn’t sit down. He stood across from the desk with both hands in his trouser pockets, waiting for Cassian to open it.

The first page was a copy of an application for a replacement birth certificate.

The second was a report from the Illinois Department of Family Services.

The third was a visitation schedule printed on a dot-matrix printer, its ruled lines already fading near the upper corner.

The name on those pages was Renley Whitfield. Six years old.

Cassian read all three pages without speaking, then went back and read them again from the beginning.

The girl was living with Mr. and Mrs. Halloway in Oak Park, under a temporary foster care arrangement made by the department. The file clearly documented the condition of the foster home, and everything written there was good—a three-bedroom house, a quiet neighborhood. The husband retired from the Department of Education. The wife teaching first grade at a public school four blocks from their home.

The caseworker’s periodic evaluations, conducted three times over the past two years, had rated the placement positively in all three areas: health, education, and adjustment.

In the margin of one page was a handwritten note left by someone at the department, saying that the child was very fond of the family cat and had learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels the previous summer.

Visitation took place once a month. Each visit was arranged in advance and confirmed in writing. An employee of the department remained seated at a nearby table throughout the meeting.

The location was a community center on the west side of the city. Room Number Four. In the morning. For two hours.

The reasons the mother hadn’t yet been allowed to bring her daughter home were listed in the file as two separate points:

She hadn’t demonstrated stable independent housing.
She hadn’t demonstrated a stable income after deducting her existing financial obligations.

Cassian stopped for a long time at the second point.

Existing financial obligations.

He closed the file and rested both hands on top of it.

Wilder said he’d investigated further and found no petition from the mother requesting an extension or any kind of exemption, no attorney representing her, and no request for reconsideration. There was only a file lying dormant at the department—taken out once a year to satisfy procedure, then closed again.

Then Wilder added one more thing, speaking more slowly than he had before.

“Seventy-two times,” he said. “Since the visitation schedule began, there have been seventy-two visits. She showed up for all seventy-two.”

Cassian sat perfectly still.

He thought of a piece of paper torn from an order pad, with four lines written in pencil and a number crossed out and reduced from 45 to 40.

He thought of small bills smoothed flat one by one against the edge of a table, all turned in the same direction, their edges carefully aligned.

He thought of an envelope peeled open and sealed again so many times that the layers of tape had built up one over another.

And he thought of a backyard and a woman standing in the middle of it, and words he’d heard but hadn’t understood.

“If you stay here, I’ll be the one who pays for it tonight.”

He’d understood those words the way anyone would have understood them. He’d thought she was afraid.

He’d been wrong.

She hadn’t been talking about fear at all. She’d been talking about a price.

And that price was a specific number. And she knew exactly how much it was.

And for six years, she’d paid it faithfully—with precisely the kind of currency people used to pay for things like that.

Throughout that entire morning in the yard, the thing Cassian Ror had failed to read wasn’t the marks on her back.

What he’d failed to read was the reason she’d stood still.

She hadn’t stood still because she was weak.

She had stood still because she was holding her place in a line.

Because once every month, there was a morning in Room Number Four of a community center.

And if she wanted to be there, she couldn’t allow anything to happen that might cause her to miss even one visit.

He rose, walked to the window, and looked down at the three miles of docks below without seeing any of them.

“Call Rosalind Hearn,” he said.