The second text came from Maya, my colleague, who’d spent four years tracing shell companies for the SEC before she got tired of it and joined me instead.
Pulled the case number off your photo. It’s real. Filed with Suffolk County Probate six weeks ago. Petitioner: Victoria Mercer. Respondent: Emily Mercer. Grounds: diminished capacity due to psychiatric instability.
Six weeks, I typed back. Before any of this happened.
Before any of what you’ve told me happened, Maya corrected. Which means the petition came first, and the symptoms came after. That’s not medicine, Claire. That’s staging.
I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling of my own apartment for a long moment — the kind of pause I usually reserved for spreadsheets where the numbers were too clean to be honest. A staged illness didn’t need a real doctor. It needed someone willing to sign his name to whatever Victoria needed signed, and a family unwilling to ask the one question that would have unraveled it: why now?
I sat with my coffee going cold and thought about the way Emily’s hand had trembled reaching for a water glass, the way she’d pulled her sleeve down before anyone could look too closely. Not a symptom. A performance someone else had scripted, and Emily was the only one on stage who knew it wasn’t real.
Daniel called at noon.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “Everything okay after the weekend?”
“Your family’s intense,” I said carefully. “Emily seemed rough.”
“She’s always been fragile.” A practiced answer, delivered too fast.
“Has a doctor seen her?”
“Mom’s handling it. There’s a specialist — Dr. Halloway, I think. Family friend.”
Family friend. Not Emily’s doctor. Not even really a stranger with a license. A friend of Victoria’s, writing evaluations for a woman he had a personal relationship with the family that filed against her.
“Did you sign anything?” I asked, as lightly as I could manage. “For her care?”
A pause. Long enough to answer the question before he did.
“Mom asked me to co-sign some paperwork last month,” he said. “Said it was for getting Emily into a program. I didn’t read the whole thing — it was like forty pages, Claire, and Mom was crying, and I just wanted Emily to get help.”
“What if it wasn’t for a program?”
