“Yes,” he said. “But there were witnesses. Cameras. She won’t rewrite it.”
Evelyn’s mouth trembled.
“She always rewrote everything.”
Nathan smoothed a strand of hair from her bruised forehead. “Not this.”
A nurse came in to check her vitals. Evelyn endured the attention with the dazed obedience of the badly injured, but her eyes kept moving toward Nathan, asking questions she did not have the strength to form.
When the nurse left, Evelyn forced one word through her raw throat.
“Name.”
Margaret leaned closer. “The baby?”
Evelyn nodded.
Nathan said, “They have her listed temporarily.”
Pain flickered across Evelyn’s face. “Mercer?”
No one answered fast enough.
Her tears changed. Not fear this time. Fury.
“No.”
“Evy, we can handle it later.”
“No.” Her voice was barely air, but the will inside it filled the room. “Not his name.”
Nathan bent over her hand. “Then tell me what you want.”
Evelyn closed her eyes. For a moment he thought she had slipped under again. Then her fingers tightened weakly around his.
“Clara,” she whispered.
Margaret covered her mouth.
Evelyn opened her eyes. “Clara Beaumont.”
Nathan felt something inside his chest give way.
Their grandmother’s name. Their mother’s maiden name restored through her daughter. A name Grant had not purchased, not touched, not earned.
Margaret began to cry silently.
Nathan bowed his head over Evelyn’s hand.
“I’ll make it happen,” he said.
Evelyn’s gaze searched his face with exhausted urgency. “Promise.”
“I promise.”
She seemed to rest then, but only for a breath.
“Is she alone?”
“No,” Nathan said. “There are nurses with her constantly.”
Evelyn looked toward the door as if she could will herself out of the bed, across the hall, through walls and machines, into the plastic-warmed world where her daughter lay beneath lights.
“Tell her,” Evelyn whispered.
“What?”
Her lips parted. The effort cost her. Nathan leaned close enough to hear.
“Tell her I’m coming.”
Nathan’s throat burned.
“I will.”
“And Nathan?”
“Yes?”
Her eyes fixed on his, clearer now despite the drugs, despite the injury, despite the terrible long day that had tried to take everything from her.
“Don’t let him touch her.”
Nathan straightened.
Outside the room, the ICU hummed softly. Beyond the hospital walls, November pressed its cold hands against the glass. Somewhere, Grant Mercer was learning the limits of locked doors. Somewhere, Marissa Vale was sitting beneath fluorescent lights with mascara dried on her cheeks, discovering that regret was not the same thing as innocence.
And in the NICU, Clara Beaumont took another assisted breath.
Nathan looked at his sister, battered and pale and alive beneath the thin hospital blanket, and made the kind of vow that did not require witnesses because it had already become law inside him.
“He won’t,” he said.
Evelyn closed her eyes.
For the first time since the marble steps had risen up to meet her, she slept.
Nathan rode in the ambulance beside her.
One of the paramedics tried, for exactly three seconds, to tell him that family members usually followed in their own vehicles. Nathan turned his head slowly and looked at the man, his suit jacket darkening at the cuffs with Evelyn’s blood, his face so white and still it seemed carved from the same courthouse stone that had nearly killed her.
The objection withered.
“Fine,” the paramedic said, and slammed the doors.
The ambulance tore away from the courthouse with its siren screaming through Fairfax, cutting across traffic, scattering noon-hour commuters who would later tell each other they had seen the aftermath of something terrible without knowing they had only witnessed its shadow. Inside, everything was motion: gloved hands, clipped instructions, the metallic rattle of equipment, oxygen hissing through a mask, the monitor shrieking and settling and shrieking again.
Evelyn lay strapped to the stretcher, her face ghost-pale beneath streaks of blood and rain. Her hair, always so carefully pinned or brushed smooth, clung damply to her temple. One arm had been secured against her body. The other rested at her side, fingers curled faintly, as though somewhere deep beneath shock and pain she was still trying to protect the child inside her.
Nathan kept his hand wrapped around those fingers.
“Stay with me,” he said, though he knew she could not answer. “Evelyn, stay with me. You do not get to leave me here with all your unfinished arguments.”
The paramedic closest to him glanced up, perhaps at the oddness of the sentence, perhaps at the restraint in Nathan’s voice. But Nathan was not speaking for anyone else. He was anchoring himself to the only thing he still had the power to do.
Talk.
He had spent his adult life making language into a weapon. He had bent juries with it, cornered liars with it, drawn confessions out of silence and truth out of rot. But now his words had no edge. They were only a thread cast into darkness.
“Her pressure’s dropping,” one paramedic said.
“Baby’s heart rate?”
“Decelerating.”