POV: Mara
I was already dressed when my father called again at seven in the morning.
I let it ring twice, then picked up, because I had decided somewhere between three a.m. and sunrise that I was done running from conversations. Running was for people who still had something to lose.
"Come home," he said. No good morning. No are you okay. Just the quiet command he'd been using on me my whole life, the one that assumed I would comply because I always had.
"I'll be there in an hour," I said.
I hung up before he could say anything else.
---
June was already in the kitchen when I came out. She slid a coffee across the counter without being asked and pointed at a plate of toast like she'd known exactly when I'd emerge and what I'd need.
"He's in a meeting," she said. "He said to tell you the lawyer arrives at noon."
"I know," I said.
She looked at me sideways. "You slept?"
"No."
"Yeah." She picked up her tablet. "Neither did he."
I wanted to ask her what that meant. I wanted to ask her a lot of things — like how long she'd worked for Dominic Crane, and whether he made a habit of proposing to women on sidewalks, and whether that phone call I'd heard through the wall at midnight meant what I thought it meant.
But I drank my coffee instead and saved my questions for the people who owed me answers.
---
My parents' house looked exactly the same.
That bothered me more than I expected. I don't know what I'd imagined — that the walls would have shifted somehow, that the house would look different on the outside now that I knew what it had been hiding. But it was the same cream-colored front door, same potted plants on the steps, same everything.
Lies, apparently, don't change the paint.
My mother opened the door before I knocked. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hair not yet done — which for my mother was the equivalent of another person walking outside in their underwear. She always had her hair done. Even at my sister's funeral, her hair was done.
She reached for me.
I stepped back.
Her hands fell.
"Mara—"
"Where's Dad," I said.
---
He was in the sitting room. Lena was there too — and that stopped me at the doorway for exactly three seconds. She was sitting in the armchair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, holding a mug in both hands. She looked up when I walked in and something moved across her face — guilt, maybe, or something trying to look like it.
I looked at her for those three seconds.
Then I looked at my father.
"Talk," I said.
He folded his hands. That gesture — patient, composed, the one that meant he had already organized his thoughts and was about to present them in the most favorable possible order — made me want to put my fist through the window.
"Five years ago," he began, "Lena made a serious mistake."
"I'm right here, Dad," Lena said quietly.
"I know where you are," he said, and continued. "She had gotten involved with someone dangerous. A man with connections that threatened this family's standing, our finances, our safety. The situation required a solution."
"The solution was letting me believe she was dead," I said.
"The solution was removing her from a situation that could have destroyed all of us." His voice didn't change. Steady, reasonable, like he was explaining a business decision to a junior employee. "We staged the accident. She went somewhere safe. We planned to tell you when the danger had passed."
"Five years," I said.
"These things take time."
"Five years is not time, Dad. Five years is a choice. Five years is my sister's birthday every March and me sitting at her grave talking to an empty box in the ground." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it, hated that it cracked, hated that they could hear it. "Five years is me grieving someone who was alive and you watching me do it."
My mother made a sound. I didn't look at her.
"We protected the family," my father said.
"You protected Lena," I said. "That's not the same thing."
Silence.
And here it was — the moment I had been waiting for since I walked in. The moment one of them would look at me. Really look. Would see the faint mark still sitting on my cheek from Seth's hand. Would say something. Would ask if I was okay.
My father's eyes were on the coffee table.
My mother was looking at Lena.
Lena was looking at her mug.
Nobody looked at me.
I waited ten more seconds. I counted them. One. Two. Three. Four. I gave them every one of those seconds to be the parents I needed them to be.
They didn't take it.
"Okay," I said.
I stood up.
"Mara." Lena's voice. Small. "I'm sorry. I know that's not enough but I need you to know—"
"You had two years," I said. "Seth told me last night. You've been back for two years. You had two years to call me. To write one letter. To let me know you were breathing." I looked at her then, really looked, and I saw her flinch. Good. "You didn't."
I walked to the door.
"If you walk out of this house right now," my father said behind me, "you are making a choice that cannot be undone."
I stopped with my hand on the door frame.
He meant it as a warning. As the final move in a chess game he assumed he was still winning.
I almost told him then. Almost turned around and said — I already made a choice last night, actually. I made it on a sidewalk with a stranger and his lawyer is coming at noon and your move, Dad.
But I didn't.
Because something cold and clear had settled in my chest during that silence when nobody looked at me, and it felt a lot like the end of something and the beginning of something else entirely, and I wasn't ready to show my hand yet.
"I know," I said simply.
And I walked out.
---
I was three blocks away when my phone buzzed.
Not my parents. Not Seth.
June.
Change of plans. Dominic moved the lawyer to nine a.m. He also ran a background check on your father this morning.
I stopped walking.
What did he find? I typed back.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Then June's reply came through and I read it twice because once wasn't enough to understand what I was seeing.
Mara. Your father has been in contact with Dominic's uncle Arlo for the past six months. Regular calls. Wire transfers. I think your family's situation and Dominic's board problem are connected.
The street tilted under my feet.
Which means, June typed, someone set up both of you.
And I don't think last night was an accident.