Her eyes swept past the shed. Past me.
She didn’t see me. But for three full seconds, she looked exactly like a woman counting something in her head and coming up one short.
Then she turned, took Emily by the elbow with a grip too firm to be affectionate, and steered her inside.
The door closed. A bolt slid home.
I stood in the dark a long time after the lights went out, the pill bottle warm now from my own hand, the folded paper pressed flat against my ribs like something that could burn through fabric if I held it too long.
Ten days.
I didn’t know yet what would happen in ten days. I only knew that whatever Daniel had signed, he’d signed it believing his mother’s version of his sister — and somewhere in that house, a woman who specialized in numbers that didn’t lie was about to become the one thing the Mercers had never accounted for.
I walked back to my car without looking behind me, and for the first time since I’d met Daniel’s family, my hands weren’t the ones shaking.
Whatever waited for Emily inside that house wasn’t finished. Ten days wasn’t a countdown to something good, and I intended to spend every one of them finding out exactly what it was counting toward.
PART 3
By 8 a.m. I had photographed both sides of the folded document, isolated the imprint code stamped into each white pill under a jeweler’s loupe I kept from an old fraud case, and sent both to two different people who owed me favors.
The first text came back within the hour, from a pharmacist named Rosa I’d worked with on an insurance case years ago.
That imprint isn’t a vitamin, Claire. It’s a controlled sedative — the kind used off-label to manage severe agitation. Wrong dose, wrong person, it’ll make you look confused, sluggish, unsteady on your feet. Exactly what a doctor would want to see if he was writing you up as incompetent.
I read it twice before I let myself feel anything about it.
A real prescription bottle carries a pharmacy’s name, a doctor’s license number, a warning label printed in six-point type nobody reads — every one of those details exists so a stranger could trace the pill back to whoever prescribed it. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing every single one before it ever reached Emily’s hand.
