Chapter 12 - The Offer
By afternoon, a lawyer was waiting outside the room where Emma and I had been allowed to rest.
He wore a blue suit and carried a leather folder.
“Nora Bell?”
“Who are you?”
“I represent the Duca family.”
“Which one?”
His smile faded.
“Miss Vittoria Duca would like to make sure you and your daughter are provided for.”
I glanced behind me.
Emma sat on the bed eating crackers with the social worker.
I stepped into the hall and pulled the door nearly shut.
“Say what you came to say.”
He opened the folder.
A house.
A trust for Emma.
A monthly payment larger than anything I had ever earned.
My eyes caught on the number.
I won’t pretend they didn’t.
I had counted quarters for laundry.
I had watered down soup so Emma could have the last full bowl.
Money didn’t stop being useful because it came from someone cruel.
“What does she want?”
“A clarification.”
“Of what?”
“Your impressions last night were formed under extreme stress.”
“There it is.”
“No one is asking you to lie.”
“What would you call it?”
He lowered his voice.
“A child needs stability.”
I looked through the gap in the door.
Emma was feeding a cracker to the empty space beside her.
Where Rabbit should have been.
I stepped back.
“My child needed her father.”
The lawyer closed the folder.
“These situations become complicated.”
“Only for people who keep making them complicated.”
I called Reyes.
The lawyer left before she arrived.
She listened, then asked me to describe him.
“Was it illegal?”
“Offering money isn’t automatically illegal. Asking you to change truthful evidence is something I want documented.”
I gave her every word I could remember.
That evening, she played the rest of Daniel’s recording for me.
His voice was steady at first.
Then I heard the fear beneath it.
“I have a little girl,” he said. “I’m not trying to be a hero. I just want out.”
I bent forward and cried into my hands.
Reyes let me.
When I could breathe again, she said they had recovered payment records tied to the man who had worked on Daniel’s truck.
He had been found.
He was alive.
And he had agreed to speak.
My phone lit up.
An unknown number.
One message.
You should have taken the house.
May you like
Beneath it was a photograph of the hospital room door.
Taken from the hallway.
