They agree to meet at a restaurant in her neighbourhood, a hamburger joint on Broadway called Moody's. The place turns out to be dark, with formica tables and paper napkins. Stacy Shanahan, arrived before Futterman, is seated in a booth along the wall. 

She appears — no surprise — tired, under strain. She is a striking young woman, black Irish, with long brunette hair pulled back in a ponytail, luminous blue eyes. Those eyes are now ringed with a slight shadow, the beginning of bags forming beneath them. She's wearing jeans and a red T-shirt under a white sweater.  

"How go things at Sidley?" Futterman begins, thinking it best to start with small talk. "Hope the new job is all you expected of it."

"Everything there is fine," she says. "I only wish I could enjoy it, but my mind is of course elsewhere."

Futterman has had nearly a full day to think things through. Was Stacy Shanahan a con woman, playing him for money? He decided not. Ought he to demand a DNA test? Here, too, he determined to believe her when she said that the child was his. A pity, he thought, that he couldn't remember a thing about how he had helped conceive it. What Futterman decided was to decide nothing at all, but hear out her story. 

"I'm sure you have thought about an abortion," he says. 

"I have and I have had to reject it," she says. "Even though I no longer go to church regularly, I am still enough of a Catholic not to be able take abortion lightly. It's a mortal sin, you know, one of the big ones. Abortion, I'm afraid, is a solution unavailable to me." Her voice breaks and Futterman notes her eyes beginning to water.