Chapter 5 - The Woman Who Remembered the Song
Maryanne did not recognize Adeline when she entered the care home the following morning. She smiled politely, adjusted the blanket across her knees, and asked whether the young woman had come about the flowers. Adeline felt the familiar sharpness of loss without its accompanying surprise. Some grief renewed itself every morning.
“No,” she said. “I came to sit with you.”
She brought the silver hair clip. Maryanne stared at it, then touched the scratched metal with one finger. Her mouth moved as if tasting a word. Adeline clipped it gently into her mother's hair, just as she had months earlier, and waited.
Maryanne began singing the old lullaby. This time, halfway through, she stopped and said, “Daniel hates the blue truck.”
Adeline sat very still. Her father's crash report mentioned a blue freight vehicle near the overpass. Investigators had never identified its driver. “What blue truck, Mom?”
“Too close to the guardrail.” Maryanne's eyes clouded. “He said somebody changed the numbers.”
“Which numbers?”
Maryanne turned to the window. A moment later she asked for tea, and the memory was gone.
Adeline wrote the words down immediately, including the fact that Maryanne had been confused before and after speaking them. She did not want a fragment of memory turned into an invented confession. Detective Park accepted the note as a possible lead, not proof, and ordered a review of the traffic-camera records that had survived the crash investigation.
In the care home's conference room, the administrator and a social worker showed Adeline the billing history. The trust's contributions had entered a restricted account under Maryanne's name, but the payments had been reversed as “incorrect remittances” before they reached the care home. The money had then moved to a management company associated with Ezra. The administrator looked appalled.
“We never saw these statements,” she said. “Our invoice to you was accurate based on what our system showed. Someone diverted the payments outside our process.”
“Then give me a letter explaining that,” Adeline said. “Please don't just tell me you're sorry.”
She spent the afternoon assembling a folder: her father's loan documents, her old car sale receipt, Elmrove's billing records, and the new audit. Before she left, she put a second copy with her own independent lawyer, Miriam Cole. She had learned at the lake house that a document held by only one frightened person could vanish.
Cassian was waiting in the lobby, not outside Maryanne's room. Adeline had asked him to stay away until she invited him. He obeyed. When she emerged, he stood and offered her a paper cup of coffee.
“I'm not hungry,” she said.
“I know. It's tea.”
She accepted it. They sat on a bench near the front doors while rain worked at the glass. “My mother remembered a blue truck,” Adeline told him. “Maybe it means something. Maybe it doesn't.”
“My father used to say evidence is what survives the story we tell about it.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Not often enough.”
Cassian told her something he had kept buried since he was nineteen. He had worked in the harbor as a trainee during a chemical spill. After he collapsed and was hospitalized, Ezra arranged fertility testing and explained that the exposure had left him permanently sterile. Cassian never requested a second opinion. His father had died soon afterward; the company was collapsing under lawsuits; he had simply accepted one more thing that had been taken from him.
“Did you ever want children?” Adeline asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “Then I stopped letting myself want them. It's easier to call something impossible than admit how badly you miss it.”
She looked down at her cup. “I wanted to tell you before dinner. I was trying to find a time when the truth belonged to us, not the whole family.”
“You were entitled to that.”
“And I'm entitled to decide what happens with the pregnancy, including my medical care.”
“I agree.”
“Then don't send your own doctor. I'll choose an obstetrician who doesn't answer to your office.”
Cassian nodded. “I'll drive you if you ask. If you don't, I won't.”
Their conversation might have ended there. Instead, he placed a sealed envelope on the bench between them. It contained an amended agreement drafted at his instruction and reviewed by Miriam. The marriage contract's requirement for appearances was removed. Maryanne's long-term care was to be funded through an independent escrow whether Adeline stayed or left. Adeline was not obliged to sign it that day.
She read the first page and set it back down. “This is a beginning, not forgiveness.”
“I know.”
On the ride home, Detective Park called. The recovered traffic footage was incomplete, but a freight dispatch record placed Roy Develin's truck on a service road near Daniel's overpass twenty minutes before the collision. Another document put Roy in Ezra's office the next morning.
Park paused. “There's more. We located your father's final email to the safety regulator. He reported altered weight certificates and asked for a meeting the day after he died.”
Adeline closed her eyes. Her father had not been careless. He had been trying to tell someone that the numbers were wrong.
At the estate, Ezra's office was empty. His personal car was gone, his email account had been disabled, and the original trust ledgers had disappeared from the upstairs safe.
But on his desk, beneath a paperweight, he had left a copy of Adeline's pregnancy report with four words handwritten across it.
YOU CANNOT PROVE PATERNITY.
May you like
Before sleeping, Adeline called the night nurse at Elmrove. Maryanne had eaten most of her supper and was listening to music in the common room. Adeline asked the nurse to tell her mother she loved her, even if Maryanne might not remember who had sent the message. The nurse promised she would.
Adeline then placed the threatening photocopy beside the other evidence, not under her pillow where fear wanted her to keep it. She thought of her father writing numbers on a report no one wanted to read, and for the first time imagined that finishing his work could mean living a different life rather than sacrificing her own to his memory.
