“What else would it be for?”
I didn’t tell him. Not yet. Because I could hear, underneath his confusion, something that wasn’t complicity — it was the particular blindness of a son who had never once been asked to doubt his mother, and I needed to know whether that blindness would break or calcify once I put the truth in front of it.
“I have to go,” I told him. “Long day.”
He said he loved me. I said it back and meant it, which made the rest of it so much harder.
Victoria called forty minutes later. I hadn’t given her my number. Daniel must have.
“Claire, darling,” she said, warm as candlelight. “I thought we got off on the wrong foot this weekend. Lunch, just us girls? Thursday?”
“I’d like that,” I said, matching her warmth exactly.
“Wonderful.” A pause, delicate as a blade laid flat against skin. “Oh — and Emily mentioned she wandered the garden last night. Poor thing gets so disoriented after dark. We’re adjusting her dosage. Better safe.”
The line went quiet, waiting for my reaction.
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever she needs.”
“You understand,” Victoria said. “Family looks after its own.”
She hung up before I could answer, which told me she hadn’t wanted an answer. She’d wanted to see if I’d flinch.
I sat with the phone in my hand for a long moment, thinking about the word adjusting the way I used to think about a spreadsheet column that didn’t reconcile — not as a mistake, but as a message from someone who assumed no one else was reading closely enough to notice what it meant.
They knew Emily had been outside. They knew something had changed. And instead of asking why, Victoria’s answer had been to increase the dose.
I opened a new file on my laptop and named it the way I named every case that mattered: not after the victim, and not after the family’s name on the mailbox, but after the first lie I’d caught them in.
MERCER — VITAMIN D.
Then I picked up the phone and called Maya back.
“I need everything on a Dr. Halloway,” I said. “And I need it before Thursday.”
Thursday wasn’t a lunch date anymore. It was a deadline, and I intended to walk into that dining room already knowing more about the Mercers than they knew about themselves.
PART 4
