Chapter 15 - The Missing Week
Frank met them beneath the elevated train tracks, his hands shaking so badly he couldn't hold his coffee. Nora refused to hug him.
At the clinic Nora saw a photograph of herself in an admission file. She was thin, seventeen going on eighteen, wearing a hospital gown and staring straight past the camera. A nurse's note said she asked for her mother repeatedly. Another said her distress had been managed with medication. She couldn't remember the room, but her body reacted to it: cold hands, tight throat, the smell of disinfectant suddenly everywhere. She held the photograph until her fingers stopped shaking. Those lost days belonged to her, even if somebody had tried to make them disappear.
"You get one chance," she said. "No more half-truths."
Frank showed her records from a private clinic. At eighteen, Nora had been sedated for six days after witnessing a meeting at the Whitmore estate. She remembered none of it. Frank said he'd signed the consent forms after Grant's father threatened to kill them both.
"You let them erase my memory?"
"They told me you were having a breakdown. By the time I realized what they were doing, it was too late."
"You keep saying you were afraid," Nora said. "You were my father. I needed you to be brave once."
Frank looked down. "I know."
He told them Vale was being held at the vacant Riverfront Medical Center, a property Black Harbor used for private interrogations. Frank had arranged a distraction: a fake fire alarm on the west wing.
Eli wanted to leave Nora behind. He stopped himself before saying it. "What do you want to do?"
She gave him a tired, grateful look. "I want to get Vale and get the evidence to somebody who can use it."
At the medical center, Tessa triggered the alarm from a service box while Nora and Eli crossed the dark second floor. They found Vale shackled to a bed. He was conscious, barely.
"The recording," he rasped. "Grant has a recording of you."
"Of what?"
"You saw the person who gave the order to kill June. That's why they drugged you."
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Nora cut his restraints. Vale grabbed her arm with surprising strength.
"It wasn't Arthur," he said. "It was your father."
