Chapter 4 - THE HOUSE BEHIND THE TREES
Ruiz told me to stay at the hospital.
I told her I was going.
She looked at Marcus.
“Keep him out of my way.”
Briar House sat behind iron gates forty minutes north of the city. Its website called it a private recovery residence.
Soft photographs.
Green lawns.
Women smiling beside garden beds.
At two in the morning, the place looked like a house trying not to be seen.
Police vehicles waited beyond the curve while Ruiz confirmed information with someone inside the department.
June met us near an old maintenance entrance.
She was in her sixties, wearing a housekeeping uniform beneath a man’s winter coat.
Blood marked the cuff of one sleeve.
“Are you hurt?” Marcus asked.
“Fence caught me.”
She barely looked at him.
“Is Sophie safe?”
“Yes,” I said.
June covered her mouth.
For one second, she let herself shake.
Then she pointed toward the house.
“Lena’s in the east wing. Room twelve. They moved her downstairs after the last inspection.”
“How long has she been here?”
June looked at me.
“Longer than I have.”
I almost asked why she hadn’t called sooner.
Then I saw her face.
The shame was already there.
“They told me she attacked her baby,” June said. “They said the husband died. Every letter she wrote disappeared into the office.”
“What changed?”
“She asked me to look at a newspaper photograph.”
“My photograph?”
June nodded.
“Your hospital fundraiser. Last month.”
Lena had seen me alive in a newspaper while I was accepting an award for generosity.
I bent over, hands on my knees.
Marcus stayed beside me without speaking.
A radio crackled.
Movement behind the house.
A white transport van.
Ruiz moved first.
Police lights flashed through the trees.
The van lurched toward the service road, then stopped when a cruiser blocked it.
I saw a woman through the rear window.
Dark hair.
One hand against the glass.
I was running before Marcus caught my jacket.
“Let them open it.”
“That’s my wife.”
“Then let them get her out safely.”
An officer opened the rear doors.
Lena sat strapped into a transport chair.
She was thinner than I remembered.
There were gray threads in her dark hair.
Her eyes moved over the police, the trees, the flashing lights.
Then they found me.
She didn’t smile.
She recoiled.
“No.”
I stopped.
“Lena.”
She shook her head so hard her hair fell across her face.
“No. They said you approved it.”
My chest tightened.
“Approved what?”
Her voice broke.
“The transfer. Roman, please.”
She stared at me like I was the last person who could save her.
May you like
Or the person who had put her there.
“Don’t send me back.”
