For the first time in four days, I let myself feel something like relief.
It didn’t survive the night.
Emily called me at 1 a.m. from a number I didn’t recognize, her voice pressed down to almost nothing.
“She found the bottle gone,” Emily whispered. “She counted them, Claire. She always counts them.”
“Where are you?”
“Bathroom. Door locked.” A shuffling sound, like she was sliding down a wall to the floor. “She said if I think you can save me, I don’t remember what happened to my sister.”
My stomach dropped somewhere I couldn’t reach to fix.
“She knows I have the pills?”
“She knows someone does. She doesn’t know it’s you yet. But she moved the hearing up.” Emily’s breath hitched, once, twice. “It’s not in three weeks anymore. It’s in two days. Before my birthday. Before the trust vests.”
“Emily, listen to me—”
“I have to go. She’s outside the door.” A click, and the line went dead before I could tell her to stay calm, to stay safe, to hold on — words that would have meant nothing against a locked door and a mother who had already done this once and gotten away clean.
I stood in my kitchen at one in the morning holding a phone gone silent, and understood, finally, what Victoria had been counting in the garden three nights before.
Not pills.
Time. She’d been counting how much of it she had left before someone outside her house started counting too.
I didn’t sleep after that call. I sat at my kitchen table with the case file open in front of me — the pill bottle, the petition, Grace’s redacted filing — and understood that whatever I did next couldn’t wait for lawyers moving at a lawyer’s pace. Two days wasn’t a timeline anymore. It was a closing door, and Emily was still on the wrong side of it.
PART 5
I called Daniel before sunrise, because some conversations only survive if you have them before either of you has had time to build defenses.
“I need you to come to my apartment,” I said. “Now. Before you talk to your mother.”
He must have heard something in my voice, because he didn’t ask why. He was at my door in twenty minutes, hair uncombed, looking at me like I might be about to end things between us.
