Chapter 2
I answered on the second ring, my voice perfectly level, two years of practice making it easy. "Daniel, where are you? The board dinner starts in an hour."
"I'll be there," I said.
Lena's hand closed hard around my wrist the moment I hung up. "She'll know something's wrong."
"No," I said, "she won't," and opened the false bottom of my briefcase I'd had custom-built eight months earlier, after the third inconsistency in Lena's file finally broke through whatever fog grief had kept me in. Inside sat a secured phone, a direct line to Agent Marcus Reyes of the FBI's financial crimes division, and a private intelligence firm I'd quietly retained the week I discovered Dr. Mercer's signature on Lena's death certificate didn't match the signature on three other documents he'd filed that same year.
For two years, my mother and everyone around her believed grief had hollowed me out, made me soft, malleable, easy to manage. In truth, grief had made me patient enough to spend two years building a case so complete that even Evelyn Ashford's lawyers wouldn't find a seam to exploit.
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I kissed Grace's forehead while Lena watched me with eyes that hadn't fully believed yet that this was real, that she wasn't still locked in that house outside Millbrook waiting for my mother's footsteps on the stairs. Every instinct told me to drive to my mother's estate that instant and put my hands around the truth of what she'd done. But rage was exactly what Evelyn expected, the same way she'd expected a son too broken by loss to look closely at a death certificate. Evidence would dismantle her completely. Rage would only give her something to spin.
I typed one message into the secured phone. SHE IS ALIVE. BEGIN PHASE TWO.
