Chapter 8 #3
The room grew very quiet. Suddenly, I saw him not as the stern master of the house, not as a retired general in a wheelchair, not as a man who wielded barbs in place of comfort.
I saw a man whom someone had once tried to rewrite, too.
Make him guilty, convenient, silent. Only they hadn't drowned him in a river.
They had drowned him in papers. Reports.
Signatures. And perhaps that was why he understood so well what they were doing to me now.
"Did you clear your name?" I asked.
He gave a humorless smile.
"Partly."
"What does that mean?"
"The people who needed to know found out. The people who needed to answer for it did. To everyone else, I'm still a difficult man with a complicated history."
"Are you satisfied with that?"
"No. But I've learned to live with partial justice. It's far more common than the complete kind."
I considered that. Partial justice. I wanted complete justice.
I didn't merely want to prove Adrian had lied.
I wanted the entire city to watch him tear the life vest from my hands.
I wanted Nikki to hear my child's heartbeat and realize that she hadn't won, she had only been granted a temporary reprieve.
I wanted Vivian to find herself in a room where everyone knew the truth and no door would open at the sound of her last name.
But perhaps, for now, I really did need to stop demanding an elegant ending from fate.
First, I needed to live until the next morning.
"I want complete justice anyway," I said.
"Everyone does."
"I'm not everyone."
Graham turned his head and studied me.
"That's better."
"What is?"
"You're beginning to get angry not like a victim, but like an owner."
"An owner of what?"
"Yourself."
My eyes stung at the words, but I didn't cry. I didn't want to. I'd had enough water. I turned toward the gray window and whispered:
"If my child survives, I won't give my baby the name Mercer."
"Good."
"Adrian will be furious."
"Another benefit."
"You're a terrible man, Graham Lawson."
"A living one. Terrible people tend to be hard to kill."
"Then I have a chance."
"You have more than a chance. You have a motive."
The day dragged on. Sleep began pulling at me again, but now it didn't feel like an abyss.
The heartbeat sounded inside me, and I carried it with me like a tiny lantern down a dark corridor.
Just as I reached the edge of sleep, I heard Graham's phone vibrate.
He answered quietly, but I still caught part of the conversation.
"Yes. Talk to me... When?... Are you sure?... Who signed it?... Understood. Don't touch anything yet. Watch them."
I opened my eyes.
"What is it?"
He put away the phone. There was nothing good in his expression.
"The Mercers filed a request for access to your private archive as the records of a missing spouse. Through the court. Expedited."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know. But if they're in a hurry, it must be important."
I sat up slowly despite his immediate frown.
"My parents."
"Possibly."
"No. Definitely. They want whatever is connected to the Hale Foundation while I exist in a legal limbo between life and death."
Graham said nothing.
"What else?" I asked, because there was more inside his silence.
He didn't want to tell me. I saw that and almost got angry. Then he spoke.
"The request wasn't signed by Adrian alone. Vivian signed it, too, and it includes a report from Gordon stating that you have lacked the capacity to manage your own records for the past several months."
I felt my face go numb.
Lacked capacity.
They weren't merely burying me. They were retroactively declaring me incompetent. Insane. Empty. Incapable. A woman who could be loved out of pity, treated without consent, divorced without the truth, drowned without witnesses, and inherited from while she was still breathing.
I looked at Graham. This time, there were no tears inside me.
"Contact Kyle."
"Lana..."
"No. Now you listen to me. You said survive first, then the plan, then the strike. I survived. You will make the plan. And the strike begins today."
He studied me for a long time. Perhaps he was searching for hysteria, weakness, fever, the very instability they were already sewing onto me with fraudulent medical reports.
But where torn, ragged pain had been yesterday, something else now stood.
Something very cold. Very clear. My child's heart was still beating inside me, and every beat became a seal beneath my decision.
Graham slowly nodded.
"All right. But we'll do it my way."
"No," I said. "We'll do it intelligently. We can decide whose ‘way’ it is as we go."
He smiled then. Only a little. Not warmly, not gently, but genuinely for the first time.
"Now I'm beginning to believe they really didn't manage to drown you."
I lay back down because my body was still weaker than my rage, and rested a hand on my abdomen.
"Hear that, little one?" I whispered. "Daddy decided he could bury me under paperwork."
Darkness gathered beyond the window. Lawson's house was silent. Somewhere in New York, Adrian might have been signing another document, with no idea that the first witness against him was already beating beneath my palm.
"We'll show him," I said softly. "We'll show him how loudly the dead can knock."