Chapter 5 - MY SIGNATURE
I stayed where she could see me.
“I didn’t know.”
Lena stared.
“I didn’t know where you were.”
A paramedic knelt beside her chair.
“Lena, I’m going to undo these straps.”
She watched his hands.
I had once watched her fall asleep on airplanes before takeoff.
Now she flinched when a stranger reached for a buckle.
They moved her into an ambulance.
She let me sit near the doors, but not beside her.
I accepted the distance.
It was the first decent thing I could give her.
“Sophie?” she asked.
“At the hospital. She’s safe.”
“Her feet?”
“Scraped. They cleaned them.”
“She hates people touching her feet.”
“I know.”
Lena looked at me.
“No. You don’t.”
The words landed where they belonged.
“You’re right.”
She closed her eyes.
For several minutes, the ambulance held only engine noise and the sound of her breathing.
Then she said, “They showed me papers.”
“What papers?”
“Your signature. Treatment approval. Custody arrangements. Statements about me.”
“I didn’t sign them.”
“I said that.”
She opened her eyes again.
“I said you wouldn’t do it. They called that denial.”
At the hospital, staff took her through a separate entrance.
Ruiz stayed outside the examination room with me.
“We’re securing records at Briar House,” she said. “Your mother’s attorney has already contacted the department.”
“Of course he has.”
“There’s a document naming you as the person responsible for payment.”
“My accounts?”
“We’re checking.”
Marcus handed me his phone.
A scanned authorization form.
My name at the bottom.
My signature.
For a terrible second, I doubted myself.
Then I saw the date.
“I was in Singapore.”
“We’ll document that,” Ruiz said.
Marcus enlarged the signature.
I knew the shape of it.
Not because I had signed that page.
Because I had signed hundreds of others.
My mother’s office kept copies of every document I had ever touched.
A nurse appeared.
“Your wife is asking whether Sophie can come in.”
I stood so quickly the chair hit the wall.
Sophie was half asleep when I carried her down the corridor.
The moment she saw Lena, she lifted both arms.
“Mama.”
Lena made a sound I had never heard from another human being.
I placed Sophie beside her.
They held each other with the fierce, awkward grip of people who had learned that letting go could cost them everything.
I stood near the door.
Lena looked over Sophie’s head.
For the first time, there was something besides fear in her eyes.
“Your mother didn’t do this alone.”
“I know.”
“No, Roman.”
May you like
She swallowed.
“The person who signed me into that place was your brother.”
