Part 2
“She looked at me first,” Claire said.
Grant turned.
Claire’s throat tightened. “Before she kicked it. She looked at me.”
Vanessa’s face went pale beneath her makeup. “You’re in shock.”
“I saw you.”
“You were on the floor.”
“I was standing when you started.”
Grant’s eyes moved between them. “What happened before I came in?”
Vanessa folded her arms. “She was trying to take your mother’s bracelet.”
Claire almost laughed, not because it was funny but because the lie was so carefully chosen. Vanessa knew exactly which accusation might still divide them. Grant’s mother had left a diamond bracelet to both children without specifying who should keep it. Vanessa had worn it for years. Claire had never asked for it.
“The bracelet is in your purse,” Claire said.
Vanessa’s fingers touched the side of the small red clutch resting on the console behind her.
Grant noticed.
Claire continued, breathing through a tightening sensation that passed across her abdomen. “She offered it to me. Then she said your mother would have hated seeing me wear it.”
“I did not.”
“She said the baby was taking the last thing she had left.”
Grant stood fully now. He seemed taller in the narrow hallway, not because of anger but because something inside him had become rigid.
“Vanessa,” he said, “tell me exactly what happened.”
His sister shook her head. “Not while she’s lying there making things up.”
Claire looked toward the camera. “You won’t have to choose which one of us to believe.”
Vanessa’s eyes filled. She had always been able to summon tears, but this time they did not fall. “You think I planned this?”
“I don’t know what you planned.”
“I planned your shower.”
“You took over my shower.”
“I paid for half of it.”
“You used Grant’s card.”
Grant’s attention shifted sharply.
Vanessa looked at him. “He told me to make it beautiful.”
“I gave you a budget.”
“I stayed near it.”
“You doubled it.”
“You didn’t complain when everyone walked in.”
“There were six people here, Vanessa.”
“The florist had a minimum.”
The absurdity of the argument sat beside Claire’s fear like a misplaced piece of furniture. The baby moved again, a small drag beneath her ribs. She concentrated on that motion and let the siblings’ voices blur.
Grant knelt again when the elevator chimed a second time. He kept one hand on Claire’s shoulder and the other around her phone as the emergency response team entered. The hallway became crowded with equipment, questions, shoe covers, and clipped instructions. Claire answered as accurately as she could. She had not struck her head. She had landed on one hip and her forearm. She felt no bleeding. She was thirty-three weeks pregnant. The baby had moved twice since the fall.
When asked whether she felt safe in the apartment, she looked at Vanessa.
“No.”
That answer quieted everyone.
Vanessa’s lips parted.
Grant did not defend her.
The responders fitted Claire with a neck support as a precaution, transferred her onto a stretcher, and moved her toward the elevator. Grant stayed beside her until one of them asked him to step back. He kissed Claire’s temple, then turned to his sister.
“You’re not coming to the hospital.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You’re staying here until the police arrive.”
Vanessa lifted her chin. “You cannot order me around like I’m a child.”
“No,” Grant said. “A child would have been frightened by what she did.”
For the first time, Vanessa looked as though he had struck her.
Claire watched the doors begin to close between them. Grant stepped into the elevator at the last second, leaving Vanessa in the hallway with the spilled roses, the tilted table, and the red light above her head.
The doors sealed.
Claire listened to the elevator descend.
Grant stood near her feet because there was no room beside the stretcher. His bow tie had shifted crookedly. A drop of vase water darkened one knee of his trousers. He stared at the floor indicator instead of at Claire.
“She knew about the camera,” he said.
Claire turned her head within the support. “She forgot about it.”
“No. She looked at it before.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. She asked whether the building kept recordings.”
Claire’s skin went cold.
Grant closed his eyes for a second. “She said she was worried about privacy because the photographer was carrying expensive equipment through the hall.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t think it meant anything.”
The elevator descended in warm silence. Grant’s reflection in the mirrored wall looked older than the man who had left forty minutes earlier to retrieve cookies.
“She was angry when you left,” Claire said.
“About what?”
“The bracelet. The baby. Me. I’m not sure which one was real.”
“All of it, probably.”
Claire looked at him. “You say that like this has happened before.”
“Not this.”
“But something.”
The elevator slowed.
Grant rubbed a hand over his mouth. “We’ll talk when you’re safe.”
The answer frightened her almost as much as Vanessa’s silence had.
At the hospital, time lost its shape.
Claire was examined, monitored, asked the same questions by people who changed but whose careful voices sounded similar. She lay beneath a thin blanket with bands around her abdomen and listened for meaning in the rapid electronic rhythm of her baby’s heart. Every small pause seemed too long. Every adjustment of the monitor made Grant sit straighter.
The pain in her back eased. A bruise darkened along her hip. The tightening in her abdomen came and went without regularity. There was no immediate sign of catastrophic injury, but the obstetric team wanted observation. They explained that symptoms could develop later and that she needed to report any bleeding, increasing pain, dizziness, fluid loss, or change in fetal movement.
Claire nodded through every instruction.
May you like
Grant wrote everything down.
He used the notes application on his phone, then copied the information onto the back of the bakery receipt because his battery had dropped to four percent. The receipt still smelled faintly of ginger. At some point, he set it beside her water cup and stared at the grease mark bleeding through the paper.
