Chapter 3
"Don't trust Jason," he whispered, barely audible, as his eyes opened.
I had three seconds to process those four words before the bedroom door began to swing inward. I lowered my hand and the edge of my veil over our joined fingers without thinking, an instinct rather than a plan, and turned toward the door as Jason's shadow filled the frame.
"Is he still quiet?" Jason asked.
I looked at Ethan's nearly closed eyes, his face arranged back into stillness with an effort I could feel trembling faintly through his hand.
"For now," I said.
Jason studied me for a moment longer than was comfortable, then nodded and left.
What followed was six weeks I would later describe to very few people in full detail, because the version that sounds reasonable in hindsight required, in the moment, a level of calm deception that frightened me more than Jason ever did.
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Ethan was not in a true vegetative state. He had been conscious, intermittently, for almost four months — locked in a body that would not respond to his commands except in small, unpredictable windows, a condition his actual treating physician (not the one Jason's people had installed, who had been quietly falsifying his progress notes) would later identify as a severe but recoverable case of locked-in syndrome following the stroke that had put him in the hospital. Ethan had heard everything said in that room for months. He had heard Jason discussing timelines with two members of the board. He had heard Vivian's private calls to the family attorney. He had heard, three days before the wedding, Jason telling someone on the phone that "the marriage doesn't matter if he never wakes up to contest the guardianship petition."
He told me all of it in fragments, over four nights, in the brief windows when his voice and his hand would cooperate, while I sat beside him pretending to read aloud from a novel in case anyone was listening at the door.
