Chapter 9 - What She Remembered
Alexander stayed outside.
He did not argue with the nurse.
He sat on the hallway floor in his expensive suit and waited.
I went in with Ortiz.
Elise watched the door until it closed.
“I’m Mara,” I said.
“David Bennett was my husband.”
She looked at me.
Recognition came slowly.
Then grief.
“Oh.”
“He tried to help you?”
Her eyes filled.
“He said his wife could find anything with a camera.”
I pressed my fingers together until the joints hurt.
“He drove me between appointments,” she said.
“He noticed they never let me answer questions.”
At first, David had been told Elise suffered from confusion.
Then she gave him a message to pass to Alexander.
He promised to try.
On the next trip, he said someone at the Whitmore office had intercepted it.
“He started writing things down.
Names.
Dates.
Which staff came with me.”
Ortiz asked whether Elise knew what happened afterward.
“They told me he’d been reassigned.”
I looked at the blanket.
Elise whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“They hurt people who help me.”
“That’s what they want you to believe.”
Her breathing quickened.
A nurse came in, checked the monitor, and asked us to keep the conversation short.
Elise had bruises from the escape and needed close observation, but the baby’s heartbeat remained steady.
I waited until the nurse left.
“Why did Julian keep you there?”
Elise looked toward the window.
“Because I found the accounts.”
Before the crash, she had worked in a Whitmore charitable foundation.
Money intended for housing grants had gone to companies with no employees and offices that did not exist.
She copied records.
Julian found out.
“He said I misunderstood.
Then he said Alexander would lose everything if I spoke.”
“Did Alexander know?”
“I tried to tell him.
His father kept finding reasons we couldn’t be alone.”
She swallowed.
“The night of the crash, we were finally going home together.”
Ortiz wrote nothing for a moment.
Then she asked about the pregnancy.
Elise rested both hands over the blanket.
“Alexander and I wanted a baby before all of this.
We made embryos.
We were supposed to choose when.”
Her voice cracked on choose.
“They didn’t let me choose.”
From the hallway came the squeak of a chair.
Elise looked toward the sound.
“Is he still there?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
“He’s starting to.”
Her eyes closed.
Then she opened them sharply.
“Cynthia had a red folder.
She kept saying the gala would make everything official.”
“What was in it?”
“A date.”
Ortiz leaned closer.
“What date?”
May you like
Elise looked down at her stomach.
“The day they planned to say my baby died.”
