Chapter 3 - The Anatomy of a Lie
We managed to get her into the apartment, a place that felt like a museum of her memory. She sat on the sofa, clutching a cup of tea, staring at the walls as if she were learning how to be a human being again. Ethan didn't leave her side, sitting on the rug at her feet, his hand resting on her knee.
"They worked for the same firm as my father," she whispered, her voice gaining strength as the warmth of the tea reached her bones. "I found out about the offshore accounts, the systematic embezzlement from the medical pension fund. I thought I could just go to the board, but I didn't realize the board was the syndicate."
She began to recount the night of the accident—or the night that should have been the end. She hadn't been in the car that went off the bridge. They had used a cadaver, dressed in her clothes, and pushed the vehicle into the river. She had been abducted, held in a basement in Queens, and eventually left to rot in the streets, a psychological experiment in how far a woman could be broken before she stopped being a threat.
"They let me go because I was supposed to be a non-entity," she said. "A nameless, homeless woman that no one would ever connect to the high-society wife of a successful architect. They gambled that I would be too traumatized to ever seek you out."
My blood boiled. I thought of the 'good' colleagues, the friends who had brought us casseroles, the partners who had patted my back at the wake. Every one of them had been an actor in a play I hadn't known I was starring in.
May you like
"Why now?" I asked. "Why point yourself out to Ethan today?"
"I couldn't help it," she confessed, a tear tracing a clean line through the grime on her cheek. "I watch you every Saturday. I’ve been watching you for months. I just needed to see him, Michael. I needed to see that he was still smiling."
