Chapter 7 #2
I closed my eyes. I had no strength. My body felt crushed, bruises pulsed beneath my skin, and the ache in my abdomen made me want to curl into a ball and never straighten again.
But Graham was right. That was what infuriated me most: he was right far too often for a man I had known for one day.
If I allowed myself to do nothing but suffer now, they would take even my memory.
Turn it into hysteria, a muddled account, a woman's fantasy, a jealous hallucination. I opened my eyes.
"You write it down," I said. "I'll talk."
Andrew brought over a phone with the recording function running.
Irene folded her arms in disapproval but didn't stop us.
For some reason, the sight of it—a retired general in a wheelchair preparing to take the statement of a drenched stranger in a hospital gown—struck me harder than the news had.
Not with tenderness. With unfamiliarity.
No one was making decisions for me. No one was telling me I was too emotional for a serious conversation.
I was being allowed to speak as though my words carried weight.
"Start from the moment they gave you the life vest," Graham said.
I swallowed.
"No. I need to start with the office."
"What office?"
"On the yacht. I saw Adrian with Nikki before the explosion. She was sitting on his desk. She was wearing my watch. The one I gave him for our anniversary."
Graham wrote quickly, in short, hard lines.
Andrew stood by the window in silence. Irene watched my face as though it were a monitor.
And I talked. Haltingly at first, then more steadily.
About the kiss. About the words "she'll smile.
" About the ladies' room. About Vivian and the attorney.
About the Hale Foundation. About the phrase "we did everything to make sure she couldn't." My voice broke there.
I stopped because suddenly I could see the clinic's white walls again, the plastic specimen cups, the nurse's hands, the blister packs of pills, my body, which I had hated because of someone else's lie.
Irene came over and gave me water. I took a sip.
"Can you continue?" Graham asked.
I nodded.
"I'll continue."
And I told them about the stage. About Nikki at the microphone.
About the congratulations to the expectant parents.
About the handshake during which she whispered that I was learning quickly how to lose.
About the first impact. About the stairwell, where I was trapped and Adrian turned away because Nikki called him.
About the deck. The life vest. The way he said she needed it more.
My pregnancy. His "prove it." The slap. My bag in the lifeboat.
His "it's not my child until I know." The order.
Push her away. At those words, Andrew swore and walked out, slamming the door hard enough to make Irene flinch.
Graham only gripped the pen tighter. He didn't interrupt.
Didn't gasp. Didn't stroke me with the word poor thing.
And that kept me above water better than any life preserver.
When I finished, the room grew so quiet I could hear the medication dripping through the tube. I lay there spent, as though I had been pulled from the water all over again, only this time the water was inside me, in my memory. Graham read over his notes. Then he looked up.
"Do you understand that this is war?"
"The war started yesterday."
"No. Yesterday they tried to remove you from the board. The war begins when they realize the piece is back."
"I'm not a game piece."
"Then stop talking like the victim of a chess match."
I gave him a bitter smile.
"You want me to become a queen already?"
"No. Right now you're a patient with a threatened pregnancy and a fever. You can work your way up to queen if you listen to your doctor and don't read comments written by idiots."
"You have a gift for inspiration."
"That's not what my degree is in."
"What is it in?"
He looked at his legs, then at me.
"Surviving other people's decisions."
Our eyes met, and for one second something strange passed between us.
Not romance. Not that slow, sweet, dangerous pull with which things had once begun with Adrian.
Something else. The recognition of two people who, under different circumstances, had been thrown out of their own lives and told to be grateful they were still breathing.
The intimacy of it made me uncomfortable because it was too honest. I looked away first.
"What now?" I asked.
"Now you disappear properly."
"I thought I'd already made a respectable effort."
"Not respectable enough. They would have found you by morning if Kyle hadn't kept quiet."
"Why did he keep quiet?"
"Guilt. Fear. Maybe the remnants of a conscience. Don't count on it as a resource."
"I stopped counting on male conscience a long time ago."
"You shouldn't generalize. Some men without consciences are simply better at hiding it, and some men with consciences stay silent at the worst possible moment. Both are about equally useless."
I let out an unexpected snort, and Irene immediately gave me a stern look. "No sudden movements." Apparently I wasn't allowed to laugh, either. Wonderful.
"What does disappearing properly mean?" I asked.
Graham set the notebook on the table.
"We're moving you to another part of the property.
Officially, you aren't here. Irene will put you under another name in her records.
Andrew will check the cameras to see who might have spotted the boat last night.
Your clothes have to be destroyed. We'll put out word along the Hudson and the riverbank that only scraps of fabric were found.
If Mercer's people come back, they'll get nothing. "
"What if the police come with a warrant?"
"Then you won't be here."
"Where will I be?"
"In the old guesthouse. It has a medical room, a separate entrance, and a signal jammer. It isn't a palace, but the walls keep people alive."
I watched him and felt them trying to move me again, hide me, rename me, but for the first time it was being done not to erase me but to preserve me. Even so, protest rose inside me.
"I don't want to be a ghost."
"You're already a ghost to them. The difference is, now the ghost gets to choose when she appears."