Part 3
“Who else knows?”
Claire’s eyes opened.
Dana raised a hand slightly. “Let’s slow down.”
“We don’t have the luxury of slowing down.”
Claire’s mouth tightened. “Yes, we do.”
Thomas looked at her.
“I’m in a hospital bed,” she said. “You’re not running this.”
“I didn’t say I was.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Dana watched them both without pretending not to.
Thomas leaned back. His medals shifted against one another. “All right.”
Claire looked unconvinced.
She had confronted Evan four days earlier in the breakfast room at the mansion. Helen was away. Evan first denied the payments, then said his mother had approved them, then said the organization would collapse if the board learned how badly several projects had gone.
“He said we only needed time,” Claire told Dana. “He wanted me to sign revised statements before the quarterly meeting.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no.”
“What happened then?”
“He took my laptop.”
“Did you try to leave?”
“Yes.”
Claire’s hand moved under the blanket to her injured knee.
“He stood in front of the door. I told him to move. He said I was panicking and should sit down. I went upstairs to get my phone and my clothes. He followed me. We argued in the bedroom.”
Thomas heard the next question before Dana asked it.
“How did you get hurt?”
Claire stared at the white blanket.
“I tried to go around him. He grabbed my arm. I pulled away and hit the bench. My knee folded under me. I struck my head on the floor.”
Thomas pictured the displaced bench at the foot of the bed.
“He called a doctor,” Claire continued. “Not an ambulance. Someone his mother knows. He said I’d had a panic attack and fallen.”
“Did the doctor examine you?”
“No. They spoke over the phone.”
Dana wrote that down.
“Evan gave me one of my pills. Later he gave me another. I kept trying to get up. He said I was confused. The room kept moving.”
“Did he lock the door?”
“The first night. After that he took the inside handle off.”
Thomas closed his eyes for one second.
Claire saw.
“Don’t,” she said.
He opened them. “Don’t what?”
“Make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you decide what happens to everybody.”
Dana lowered her pen.
Thomas looked at his daughter. “I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.”
He nodded once.
The bloodwork returned. Claire was admitted overnight for observation, fluids, and further evaluation. A domestic violence advocate offered to help her request a protective order and make a safety plan. Claire declined to speak to the police that night.
Thomas nearly objected. His daughter watched him prepare to do it.
He looked at the floor.
“Why?” he asked instead.
“Because I can’t think,” she said. “Because I don’t have my phone or my laptop. Because if I say something wrong, Evan will use it. Because the organization’s board meets Friday, and if he moves the money or deletes the records before anyone listens to me—”
“You almost died.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
Her voice was weak, but the old edge had returned. Thomas found himself absurdly relieved by it.
Dana said, “There are ways to preserve evidence without making every decision tonight.”
Claire looked at her.
“Can you help me do that?”
“Yes.”
Thomas recognized the answer Claire needed: limited, specific, honest.
He unbuttoned the top of his jacket. The room had grown warm.
A nurse brought a clear plastic bag containing Claire’s nightdress. Thomas looked at the ivory satin, wrinkled and darkened with sweat, and remembered buying Claire a red wool coat when she was nine. She had hated it because he had chosen it without asking. She wore it for two winters anyway because her mother was ill and nobody had energy for another fight.
He had forgotten the coat until that moment.
Claire’s mother, Anne, had died twelve years earlier after a fast, brutal cancer that rearranged the family and left Thomas with a daughter he loved in a language he did not speak well. He provided. He solved. He arrived. Claire had wanted him to sit on the edge of her bed and admit there were things he could not fix.
Instead, he had given her schedules.
At ten that night, Helen appeared outside the room.
Thomas saw her through the narrow window in the door. She stood with her arms folded beneath her gray-blue blouse, looking smaller than she had in the mansion foyer. A security officer remained several yards away.
Thomas stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.
“Where’s Evan?”
“At the house.”
“You said you would keep him there.”
“I can’t imprison my son.”
“No. Apparently that’s his specialty.”
Helen’s face tightened. “I deserved that.”
“What happened after I left?”
“He kept asking where she was taken. Then he called two lawyers. He said Claire was confused and had injured herself.”
Thomas stepped closer. “Did you believe him?”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
“You saw her.”
“I saw the result. I didn’t see what happened.”
The answer was cautious, almost corporate. Thomas disliked her for it.
Helen glanced through the window. “Is she awake?”
“Yes.”
“May I see her?”
“That’s her decision.”
“I know.”
Thomas found that he had expected an argument. Helen’s acceptance left him with nowhere to put his anger.
He went inside and asked Claire.
She was silent for a long time.
“Five minutes,” she said.
Helen entered without her purse. She stopped near the foot of the bed.
“Oh, Claire.”
Claire looked toward the window.
Helen pulled the visitor chair closer but did not sit until Claire nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Helen said.
“For which part?”
Helen’s fingers touched her wedding ring. “I don’t know yet.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Yes.”
Thomas remained near the door.
May you like
Helen looked at Claire’s bandaged wrist where the IV had been moved. “Evan told me you were sick. He said you’d stopped eating and were having panic attacks.”
“I was locked in a bedroom.”
