Chapter 9 - A Debt With Teeth

The money had paid for six months of my mother's treatment. Six extra months of Sunday dinners and late-night advice. Six months I wouldn't trade for anything.

It didn't turn Adrian's lie into kindness. It made the betrayal harder to sort.

“You could have told me,” I said when he came to Evelyn's office the next morning.

“I promised your mother I wouldn't,” he answered.

“She wasn't protecting me from the treatment. She was protecting me from Raymond.”

Adrian sat across the table with his hands open, as if surrendering. He confessed that Raymond had threatened to cancel the treatment funding unless Adrian signed the clean audit. My mother had insisted the money be used and then secretly documented the coercion.

“She knew she'd need proof,” Adrian said.

“Then why didn't you go to the police after she died?”

“Because Nathan told me he had someone inside the investigation. I thought I could collect enough evidence to protect you first.”

“You had three years.”

“I know.”

He didn't defend himself. That almost made me angrier.

Evelyn asked for every account, device, and message relevant to the threats. Adrian agreed to turn them over through counsel. He also admitted Celeste had once been his lover again, briefly, two years earlier during a separation he'd hidden from me.

I went still. “Our separation?”

He nodded. During the week I'd stayed with June after our first major argument, he'd slept with Celeste. He'd called me, cried, begged me to come home, and never told me why he sounded so guilty.

“You told me nothing happened.”

“I was afraid you'd leave.”

“So you made sure I stayed without knowing what I was staying for.”

Adrian started crying. I didn't reach for him.

Outside Evelyn's building, a delivery driver approached with a white bakery box addressed to me. Evelyn stopped him in the lobby while security checked the package. Inside, nestled among cupcakes, sat a child's hospital wristband.

HOPE VALE. DATE OF BIRTH: DECEMBER 25.

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Under the wristband was a note: WE CAN MAKE THIS TRUE.