Chapter 16 - Blood Doesn't Make You Safe
Nora felt the hallway tilt. "No."
Frank had once taught Nora to apologize without adding excuses. If you break the window, he said, you pay for the glass. You don't point at the baseball. She remembered that now as she listened to him explain the order he'd signed. He kept describing himself as trapped, and maybe he had been. But June had been trapped too, and she'd chosen to gather proof. Nora didn't want revenge on her father. She wanted him to stop asking her love to serve as a pardon. It was the hardest boundary she'd ever drawn, because some part of her still wanted to be his little girl.
Vale held her gaze. "Frank signed the order. But he wasn't working alone. The tape proves who pushed him."
A guard shouted from the stairwell. Eli threw a chair against the door and helped Vale stand. They escaped through an emergency exit into the alley, where Tessa waited behind the wheel of a stolen delivery van.
"Please tell me that's everyone," she said. "I'm collecting felonies like reward points."
Nora barely heard her. She called Frank. He answered on the first ring.
"Was it you?" she asked.
Silence.
"Did you order Mom killed?"
"Nora, please listen."
"Did you?"
"I signed the paper," he whispered. "They said it was a relocation order. I didn't know it meant death until afterward."
"You signed something you didn't understand because it was easier not to ask."
"I loved her."
"Then why didn't you tell the police?"
Frank began sobbing. Nora ended the call. Love wasn't proof of innocence. It hadn't protected June, and it didn't excuse him.
At the diner, they connected Vale's recovered body camera to a laptop. It held footage of his interrogation. Grant stood near him in an immaculate gray coat, talking casually while a guard struck Vale out of frame.
"You should thank me," Grant said on the video. "I kept Nora safe all these years. My father wanted her buried with her mother."
Vale spat blood. "And what do you want?"
May you like
Grant smiled straight at the lens. "I want her to look at me the way she looked at Eli before I had him killed."
Nora replayed that sentence twice. Then she said, "We're not running anymore."
