Chapter 5 - The Woman Who Wouldn't Sing

Grant parked behind a closed bakery and took my phone apart on the dashboard.

"They didn't file that in ten minutes," he said. "They were ready."

"Ready for what?"

"For you to stop cooperating."

Nora stared at the bakery windows. "Mara said your father could turn affection into a weapon. I thought she was exaggerating."

"You talked to her?"

"Every night I could. At first she couldn't remember the crash. Some days she couldn't remember her own birthday. But she knew her baby's name."

She swallowed.

"She asked if he still liked the yellow blanket with the little sailboats."

I looked down at Theo. That blanket was at home, worn through at one corner because he'd dragged it across every rug in the house.

"Nobody outside the family knows about that."

"She knows."

Grant asked Nora to explain how Mara had reached Briar Glen.

An unidentified woman had arrived sedated, carrying no insurance card and accompanied by an attorney who signed as her medical guardian. Her records said she'd suffered serious head trauma, panic attacks, and confusion. Visiting was restricted. Staff were warned she had violent delusions about her family.

"I believed it at first," Nora admitted. "Then one night she asked me what day it was. I told her. She counted on her fingers and started crying. She said, 'They made him bury me.'"

"Why didn't she escape?"

"She tried. There were locked doors, medication she didn't agree to take, and people telling her she was sick whenever she objected. Eventually she stopped telling them the truth."

I had been giving speeches about patient dignity while my wife begged a night-shift aide to tell her the date.

"Do you know who signed as guardian?" Grant asked.

Nora shook her head. "The form was scanned into a restricted file. I saw only the initials. E.M."

My initials.

Grant turned slowly toward me.

"Evan, did you sign anything after the ambulance crash that you don't remember reading?"

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I remembered my father's hand steadying the pen. I remembered a page folded beneath another page. I remembered him saying, Just the insurance forms, son.

And suddenly I knew exactly where my signature had gone.