We sign the forms, put him in the hands of the staff, and before he grasps what has happened, we will be halfway across the Atlantic. My heart stopped. I am certain of it. 10 full seconds I ceased to exist inside my own body. They weren't abandoning me.
They were disposing of me, delivering me to some bleak institution where the staff would dose me into quiet and leave me to deteriorate in a bed no one would ever visit. And the man behind that plan was my son. The boy whose hand I'd held during his first baseball game. The boy I'd sat up with through childhood fevers. The boy whose future I'd bent my own ambitions around so it could be wider and brighter than mine.
He was arranging to bury me alive. "You are a genius," Ingrid said. "I cannot wait to be free of him. Watching him shuffle through this place every day is unbearable. He smells like old age."
Declan laughed softly. Just two more days, babe. Friday is my birthday. We have the big dinner at Aurelius. We have to hold ourselves together one final time.
I brought all the investors. We need to project a thriving, close-knit family. Give the old man a decent chair at the table. Let him drift while he sits there. And then the curtain falls.
I had heard enough. I came off the wall. Every nerve in me was livewire, but not with fear. Fear is for men who still have ground to stand on. Mine had been stripped away.
The money gone, the home gone, the freedom gone. Now they were coming for whatever remained. I walked back toward my room, not the cautious shuffle of a man trying not to be heard. I moved straight and deliberate. If they caught the sound, so be it.
They were too busy toasting themselves to notice anything moving in the dark beyond that door. My small windowless room received me. I pulled the door closed behind me and left the light off. Sitting on the mattress edge, I raised both hands and held them in front of my face. The shaking was severe.
I folded my fingers inward until my fists were tight enough to ache knuckles draining pale. There in the blackness, something broke through tears. Not the soft kind that come with grief. These carried heat. These had fury folded inside them.
I had already grieved Marion three months ago. That night I grieved Declan. Whatever son I had known and loved had ceased to be somewhere in that office. What had replaced him was something cold and calculated a predator wearing a familiar face. You do not extend compassion to that.