Chapter Four

The report said seven weeks.

At that stage, our baby had been little more than a curve of light on a black ultrasound screen. I had stared at that image until I convinced myself I could see a head, hands, and Adrian's stubborn chin.

I had planned to give him the picture on our anniversary.

Instead, I spent that night listening to him say another woman's name.

Adrian stood in the wrecked hall with the phone pressed to his ear.

A drop of water struck the floor.

For a moment, I thought rain had blown through the broken entryway.

Then another drop fell.

Adrian was crying.

He did it silently. His expression hardly changed, but the tears kept falling for a child he had never known existed.

"When?" he asked.

Marcus answered through the phone. "It's dated last year, sir. There are discharge instructions from two days later. Pregnancy loss."

Adrian closed his eyes.

I remembered leaving the hospital hollowed out, a plastic bracelet still around my wrist. I remembered finding him on the sofa with my investigator's report.

I remembered how carefully he had arranged his face before asking whether Lila's stolen heart enjoyed beating inside a murderer.

He hadn't known.

He had only wanted the sentence to hurt.

It had.

"Find Frank and Diane Moore," Adrian told Marcus. "I don't care what it costs."

He left the Hart house with copies of the transplant documents.

No one tried to stop him.

The Moores had not gone far. They lived three hours away in a lakefront house with white columns, two new cars, and a brass plaque by the gate.

Ten million dollars had bought them a new life.

It had bought Lila a grave.

Frank Moore opened the door in a golf shirt. His face changed when he saw Adrian.

"We need to talk," Adrian said.

"About what?"

"Your daughter."

Diane appeared behind her husband. "Lila has been dead for six years. Let her rest in peace."

Adrian pushed past them.

"You told me the Harts chose her. You told me they had people follow her. You told me the crash was arranged."

"That's what we heard."

"From whom?"

Neither answered.

Adrian threw the transplant records onto their glass coffee table.

"The recipient was assigned through the network. The Harts never knew Lila's name until after the surgery. So tell me what really happened."

Frank's eyes moved toward the back door.

Adrian noticed.

He picked up a dining chair and brought it down across the table. Glass exploded over the rug.

Diane screamed.

"She was your daughter!" Adrian shouted. "What did you do to her?"

It took less than an hour for the story to come apart.

The Moores had been drowning in debt. Their son had been accepted to an expensive engineering program. A corrupt hospital employee had let slip that Lila was a match for a wealthy patient in Bellhaven who urgently needed a heart.

The employee introduced the Moores to a broker.

The broker arranged a staged collision on a rural road.

Lila was supposed to be injured badly enough to create a believable emergency admission. The Moores signed donor-consent papers while she was unconscious. The crash damaged more than planned. By the time Lila reached the hospital, she would never wake again.

The broker buried the connection between the collision and the recipient file. To my family, the donor process appeared valid. My father's later payment went through attorneys and was documented as support for the donor's surviving family.

To Adrian, the Moores told a different story.

They said the Hart family had chosen Lila, hunted her, and paid to silence them.

Hatred kept him from asking why the supposed witnesses had accepted the money and disappeared.

The Moores had known exactly which story Adrian would believe.

He and Lila had grown up on the same block. When his mother worked night shifts, Lila shared dinner with him on the back steps of the duplex.

Every fall, monarchs passed through the empty lot behind their building, and Lila made him stop whatever he was doing to watch them.

When his father disappeared and left unpaid bills, she helped Adrian study by flashlight after the electricity was cut. They promised each other that poverty would be temporary.

Adrian earned scholarships. Lila worked part-time and stayed home because her parents said the family needed her wages.

She and Adrian had already agreed: once he graduated and built his company, she would leave with him, and her parents would have to manage without her paycheck.

Then a professor sent him overseas for a six-month business program.

The crash happened while he was gone.

Frank called Adrian after Lila had already been declared brain-dead. He said wealthy people had arranged everything and that fighting them would only get the rest of the family killed. Diane cried into the phone and begged him not to return until the funeral was over.

By the time Adrian came home, Lila had been buried and the Moores had received my father's payment.

They showed Adrian selected pages from the donation papers, photographs of my family's cars near the hospital, and a bank statement with the Hart legal office listed beside the transfer. Each item was real. The meaning they gave it was false.

Adrian had been twenty-two, grieving, ashamed that he had been absent, and powerless against a family whose name appeared on buildings across Bellhaven.

He believed the version that gave him an enemy.

Then he spent six years becoming strong enough to hurt that enemy.

The history explained him.

It did not excuse him.

He had been young when the Moores lied. He was not young when I begged him to verify the transplant records. He had lawyers, investigators, political contacts, and enough money to uncover almost anything. He used every resource to dismantle my family and none to test the belief that justified it.

The truth had always been available.

Hatred was simply the answer he preferred.

"She was leaving anyway," Frank said at last. His voice shook, but not with grief. "She was going to run off with you and leave us drowning. At least this way she helped her family."

Adrian hit him.

Again.

And again.

"She had a future."

Diane tried to pull him away. He shoved her back without looking at her.

"She had me."

I stood near the broken table and watched.

Once, this confession might have saved me.

Now it was just the right answer showing up after the test was over.

Marcus finally dragged Adrian off Frank and got him into the car.

Adrian said nothing on the drive home.

Marcus had brought the prenatal report from the house. It lay on Adrian's lap. He kept one hand over it, protecting it from a wind that wasn't there.

When we reached the ridge house, trucks were pulling away.

The rooms had been cleared.

My clothes, books, photographs, sewing supplies, medicine, and half-finished projects were gone. The yellow note had disappeared from the trash. The cream puffs remained in the back of the refrigerator only because no one had checked behind the bottles.

Adrian stood in the empty living room beneath the butterfly chandelier.

For the first time since I died, he looked afraid.