Chapter 8 #2
The thought entered the room like a cold draft.
Kyle had seen me. He had kept quiet. So far.
But could he have told Adrian? Yes. Could Adrian doubt Kyle's silence and rush to make me legally dead while I was still weak?
Of course. A man who had said, "It's not my child until I know," wouldn't wait for his wife to return with evidence. He would bury her faster.
"Kyle," I said.
Graham nodded.
"Possibly."
"He saw me."
"Yes."
"And if he told Adrian..."
"Then we have less time."
I closed my eyes. The staircase in Lawson's house flashed before me again: Kyle below, his face drained of color, my finger pressed to my lips, his eyes turning away.
I wanted to believe his guilt was stronger than his fear.
What a luxury it was to want to believe people from Adrian's world.
That world was built so that conscience was ornamental, like flowers at a charity gala: beautiful, expensive, useless.
"I need documents," I said, opening my eyes.
"Which ones?" Graham asked.
"Mine. My parents'. The Hale Foundation. My medical prescriptions. Everything they hid. If they're turning me into a dead woman, they're rushing to cut off my access to something."
"Do you have access?"
I smiled bitterly.
"Lana Mercer only had access to her dressing room and her calendar of events. But Lana Hale seems to have more rights. They simply neglected to mention them to me."
"Where could the papers be?"
I thought, and it hurt more than speaking. I had to reenter Adrian's house in my memory, walk through the offices, remember cabinets, safes, folders, keys. A house that was no longer home but still held my stolen answers.
"Adrian's study. The lower safe behind the bookcase panel. He thought I never saw it, but I woke up one night and he wasn't there. I went downstairs and saw him closing the panel. He told me they were documents for the Mercer Foundation."
"The code?"
"I don't know."
"Anything personal? Dates? Numbers?"
I almost laughed.
"Nothing stays personal to Adrian once it becomes a risk. But he liked symbols when they worked in his favor. The date his first clinic opened. The day his father died. Or..."
I stopped.
"Or?" Graham asked.
"Our wedding day," I said quietly. "He liked to say that was the day he began a new life. Beautiful, isn't it? Using your wedding date to open a safe full of betrayal."
Andrew whistled.
"Romance among the rich ought to be its own criminal charge."
"Andrew," Irene said, though without her earlier severity.
Graham thought quickly. I could see it in his face: he was already mapping routes, people, risks. In a wheelchair, he didn't look motionless. On the contrary, everything around him began to move.
"We can't get into the house now," he said. "There are security guards, reporters, police, possibly his mother's people. But we can get the documents another way."
"How?"
"Through someone who is already inside and has something to lose."
"Kyle?"
"Kyle."
I shook my head.
"He won't turn against Adrian."
"People rarely turn against their masters out of nobility. More often, they do it out of fear that their master will sacrifice them first."
"You have such a sunny view of humanity."
"It's practical. Kyle was in the lifeboat?"
"Yes."
"He witnessed the order?"
"Yes."
"Then if this comes to light, he's an accomplice. If he helps you, he becomes a witness. The difference between those two words can sometimes save a person's career and freedom."
I looked at him and understood that he wasn't speaking as a man who had decided to help me out of pity.
He spoke as a strategist. And somewhere deep beneath my weakness and pain, something rose that I hadn't expected: respect.
Not grateful, humiliated, orphaned respect.
Something else. Equal. Dangerous. I wanted to say: I'm not a pawn.
It was as though he heard me in advance and chose not to make me one.
"Contact him," I said.
"No," Graham replied.
I blinked.
"Why?"
"Because you're emotional right now and ready to send anyone who moves into battle. That makes you like your husband, and we don't need to adopt his worst qualities."
"I'm not Adrian."
"Prove it. Survive first. Then the plan. Then the strike."
"You're giving me orders again."
"You're preparing to die beautifully again for the sake of moving the plot along."
I gasped in outrage.
"I am not preparing to die!"
"Then lie down."
"I hate you."
"Good. Hatred is invigorating. Just don't confuse your targets."
I turned away because he was right again, and Graham Lawson when he was right annoyed me almost as much as Adrian when he was wrong. The difference was that Adrian's wrongness left me drowning, while Graham's correctness kept me alive. Inconvenient arithmetic.
Irene made me drink water, then take medicine, then swallow something else revoltingly bitter.
Andrew left to check the perimeter. Graham stayed.
He didn't turn on the television, speak, or comfort me.
He simply sat by the window, and his presence became a strange wall between me and a world already painting my posthumous portrait.
I lay listening to my own breathing, still hearing that tiny pounding.
Thump-thump-thump-thump. My child's heart didn't know its father doubted it without a paternity test. Didn't know its paternal grandmother was probably preparing to put its inheritance in someone else's hands.
Didn't know the mistress had already lit a candle for my soul.
It simply beat. Stubbornly, quickly, honestly.
Perhaps that was the entire truth of life: don't explain to villains why you have the right to exist. Exist so loudly that they cannot silence you.
"Yesterday," you said they told you things hadn't happened the way you remembered them, either, I said without looking at Graham.
He was silent for a long time. I had already decided he wouldn't answer and had almost begun to regret asking when his voice came, quiet but steady.
"After I was wounded, they blamed a command failure on me. Said I'd disobeyed orders, led my men in the wrong direction, compromised the operation. A convenient version. The dead couldn't argue, and after surgery, I couldn't speak."
I turned my head.
"And you..."
"Stayed silent. For a long time. At first because I couldn't talk. Then because I didn't see the point. When someone takes your body from you, your reputation seems trivial."
"And then?"
He looked out the window.
"Then I realized they hadn't taken my body. They wanted to take my memory. That was going too far."