Chapter 8 - The Signature“It's her handwriting,” Daniel said.

“Or someone copied it,” Emma replied.

Daniel found Claire's old birthday cards and spread them across the table. The capital I, the slanted L, the strange open loop of her G: all matched. But a single letter made him stop. Claire had written “don't” without an apostrophe on the note. She never did that, not even in hurried texts.

“Maybe she was forced to write it,” Emma suggested.

“Or maybe the mistake is the message.”

Nadia called with a breakthrough. “Jane W is registered as a voluntary patient, but the consent form appears to have been signed by somebody else. We're going in for a welfare check.”

Daniel wanted to follow. Nadia refused. “Give me one chance to do this right.”

At the restaurant Emma found her manager waiting with two uniformed officers. He accused her of stealing cash tips. Emma opened her bag herself. A sealed envelope stuffed with bills sat beneath her spare sweater.

“I've never seen that.”

Daniel apologized to Emma again for the way he'd demanded the locket. She accepted without pretending it hadn't hurt. That mattered to him. His life was full of people who agreed with everything he said. He was beginning to understand how little honesty that kind of agreement could contain.

Her manager gave a practiced sigh. “I'm sorry, Emma.”

A security camera overlooking the coat closet showed an assistant manager placing the envelope in her bag thirty minutes earlier. Daniel's attorney obtained the recording before anyone erased it. Emma wasn't arrested, but she was suspended.

“You don't have to fight every part of this for me,” she told Daniel outside.

“I know. I want to fight the part where somebody's trying to destroy your life.”

She looked away. “Claire used to say you were stubborn.”

“She called it a medical condition.”

Emma actually smiled.

That night Nadia entered the center with a court order. A nurse led her down a dim corridor to Room B-12. The bed was empty, the sheets freshly stripped.

On the wall someone had scratched three words into the blue paint:

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