Chapter 17 #2
"They showed me a child's shoe. They said both bodies were badly burned and that you had been buried with Elena. The casket stayed closed. Sanford said it would be better for me to remember my sister as beautiful."
My aunt pressed her fist to her lips. I reached out to her.
Less than three feet and eighteen stolen years lay between us.
She seized my fingers in both hands, and the same tremor shook us both.
I wanted to tell her it was not her fault, that I knew how hard she had searched, that none of her years of arriving too late hurt me.
But all of that would have been a lie. So I spoke the only truth that did not require me to be a saint.
"It hurts so much that you didn't find me."
"It hurts me too," she whispered. "Every day."
Only then did I pull her to me. The embrace was awkward because of the exam table, the wires, and my belly, but I did not want beautiful. I wanted real. Aunt Katherine smelled of the road, the cold, and my mother's perfume, recognized not by my memory but by my blood.
Her last words pierced me more deeply than any needle. My aunt had not been shown my mother's body. I had been hidden under another name. The case had been closed. And all that time, the man who had certified my death had gone on living under his own name.
Graham's phone vibrated. He read the message, and his face changed. Barely. But I knew him well enough now to understand: they had not merely found an address. They had found danger.
"Is he alive?" I asked.
"Alive. He lived in Spain until last year. Returned eight months ago. He's currently a patient at a private rehabilitation center in the Hudson Valley."
"The name?" Langston asked.
"New Life."
I laughed. The sound came out dry and broken, and Irene looked at me as if she wanted to check whether my racing pulse had tipped into hysteria.
New Life. The man who had helped steal mine had given that name to a place where people were taught how to live again.
There was enough poison in that irony to kill every Mercer.
"Security?" Graham asked.
"Private. Paramilitary. Twelve acres, two entrances, cameras, its own backup substation. The center belongs to a company that received three major transfers from a Mercer clinic. The latest was ten days ago."
"Adrian was still paying him after the court hearing?"
"The chief financial officer authorized the payments. But the account belongs to Adrian's holding company."
The room tilted again. There it was, the line between ignorance and complicity.
Adrian might not have known the past, but he kept feeding the man who had buried it.
Coincidence? If coincidence knocked on the same door three times around the Mercers, it was worth checking whether it was on their payroll.
"I'm going there," I said.
"No," Graham, Irene, and Aunt Katherine answered at the same time.
"What an unexpected coalition."
"You're pregnant," Irene snapped.
"I've noticed. Someone reminds me every five minutes."
Aunt Katherine sat on the edge of the exam table.
"Lana, there are people there who already killed your family once."
"Which is precisely why I can't spend the rest of my life sitting in someone else's house, waiting for men to fight my war for me."
Graham drew his brows together.
"Your war?"
"Our war," I corrected, and that one short word suddenly hung between us as something larger than an alliance against the Mercers. It touched me from within so gently that it frightened me more than his severity ever had. I was accustomed to pain. Hope still felt reckless.
"You are not going to the center," Graham said.
"But you will be involved in every decision.
My people will assess the perimeter first. Langston will secure the necessary warrants.
The recording goes to the detective today.
We won't go after Sanford shouting accusations. We'll arrive with a case number."
"And if he runs?"
"Then our people will already know where he's going."
I looked at his hands, at the wheels of his chair, at the calm face of a man who did not promise me an easy victory. He promised only that he would not shut me out of my own fight. It was enough to make me nod.
The digital forensics expert suddenly looked up from his laptop.
"I found another file. Not audio. Vivian's phone calendar."
Langston approached the screen.
"What's on it?"
"There's an appointment from the day before yesterday marked 'V.S. New Life.' The phone's location at that time matches the center's address."
"She went to see him two days ago," I said.
"Yes," Graham replied. "And now he knows we're looking for him."
Nikki shook her head.
"Worse. He knows Lana remembered. I heard Vivian say on the phone, 'If she gets to the road, she'll piece it all together.'"
"What road?" Aunt Katherine asked.
Nikki looked at me.
"There's an old gas station on the highway where the crash happened. Its security camera was working that night. Sanford couldn't take the archive because the owner died and his son moved away. Vivian said they had to find the video before we did."
Silence settled over the room, and within it I heard not only my own breathing but the quiet rustle of a future moving toward that road again.
If the car had been captured on that recording, I could see my mother and father's final seconds.
Perhaps I would see who stopped. Who drove away.
Who stood aside and waited for the fire to burn their lie clean.
"Then what's wrong?"
Graham turned the screen toward me. I read two lines and felt my blood turn to ice again.
Sanford was not a patient.
He owned the center.