Chương 11
"You have no idea what you're talking about."
"Probably."
Ryan's voice remained calm.
"That's why I'm talking to the lawyer."
Marla inhaled.
"You called him."
There it was.
Fear.
Small, but unmistakable.
Ryan said, "Yes."
"What did you tell him?"
Nora's grip tightened.
Ryan remembered Hargrove's warning.
"That I received his email."
"Ryan."
"What?"
"Did you tell him anything about me?"
Ryan looked at the dark window.
"No."
It was the first deliberate lie he had ever told his mother without immediately feeling guilty.
Marla exhaled.
"Good."
Nora's eyes met his.
On the phone, Marla said, "We need to talk in person."
"Not tonight."
"Tomorrow."
"Maybe."
"Without Nora."
Ryan's face hardened.
"No."
"This has nothing to do with her."
"Everything I do has something to do with her."
"You see?"
Marla's voice rose.
"This is exactly what I'm talking about."
"What are you talking about?"
"She answers for you."
Ryan almost laughed.
Nora lifted both hands away from him and mouthed, Apparently.
He had to look down to hide the expression that crossed his face.
Marla continued.
"You were never like this before her."
Ryan looked at Nora lying in a hospital bed because nobody in his family had cared enough to stop using her.
"No," he said.
"I wasn't."
Marla mistook the answer for agreement.
Her voice softened again.
"You still have time to fix this."
Ryan felt something settle inside him.
Not rage.
Not even certainty.
Just a line he finally saw because someone had stepped across it too many times.
"Fix what?"
"Come home."
Ryan glanced around the hospital room.
Nora.
The monitor.
The plastic cup of melted ice.
His work boots under the chair.
"I'm already with my family."
Marla went silent.
Then she hung up.
Nora looked at him.
Ryan set the phone facedown.
Neither of them spoke for several seconds.
Then Nora said, "That was almost a speech."
"Four sentences."
"Borderline."
He laughed quietly.
The monitor continued its steady rhythm.
At 2:06 a.m., Brooke finally texted again.
Sorry.
Mom took my phone.
Ryan sat up.
The next message arrived before he could answer.
She says don't talk to you.
Then another.
I think she forged something.
Ryan read Brooke's message twice before handing the phone to Nora.
She stared at the screen until the three dots appeared again.
Brooke wrote, I saw Mom practicing your signature.
Ryan's mouth went dry.
He typed, When?
Brooke answered almost immediately.
Yesterday.
Then:
On printer paper.
Then:
She said she was checking something.
Ryan stared at the messages.
Nora's voice stayed low.
"Ask what the signature looked like."
Ryan typed the question.
Brooke replied, Yours.
He wrote, How do you know?
Because she had one of your old checks beside it.
Ryan stopped breathing for a second.
The checking account Marla used to have access to had been closed almost four years ago.
He had forgotten she might still possess old checks.
Nora said, "Screenshot everything."
Ryan did.
Every message.
Every timestamp.
Every line.
He forwarded the screenshots to his own email and then to Hargrove with a single sentence explaining that his younger sister had just disclosed possible signature copying.
Brooke sent another message.
Please don't tell her I said anything.
Ryan's thumbs hovered over the keyboard.
He wanted to promise.
Promises had always come too easily in his family.
They were handed out in moments of panic and collected later when they had become impossible.
He typed, I won't volunteer it.
Brooke answered, That's lawyer language.
Despite himself, Ryan smiled.
Nora noticed.
"She got that from you."
"No, my sarcasm has structure."
"Sure."
Ryan wrote, Are you safe where you are?
A minute passed.
Brooke answered, I think so.
He did not like the answer.
Where is Mom?
Don't know.
Paige is with her.
What about Tessa?
Asleep.
Ryan looked at the clock.
2:14 a.m.
He typed, Lock the door.
Brooke sent a thumbs-up.
Then nothing.
Ryan put the phone down.
Nora shifted under the blanket.
"You need to sleep."
"So do you."
"I've been lying down for six hours."
"You've been contracting."
"Still counts as horizontal."
Ryan leaned back in the chair.
"You really think Mom forged something?"
Nora looked at him.
"Brooke thinks she saw her practicing your signature."
"That's not proof."
"No."
"And maybe it was something stupid."
"Maybe."
"Christmas card."
"At two in the afternoon beside an old check?"
Ryan rubbed his jaw.
"I said maybe."
Nora did not push.
That irritated him more than an argument would have.
"You think I'm defending her."
"I think you're trying to leave yourself a door."
"To what?"
"To an explanation that doesn't make your mother dangerous."
Ryan looked away.
The word dangerous felt too large for Marla.
Difficult fit.
Controlling fit.
Selfish fit.
Dangerous belonged to strangers on the news.
It belonged to people whose neighbors later said they had always seemed normal.
It did not belong to the woman who used to cut the crusts off his sandwiches because he hated them.
He hated that those memories still mattered.
He hated himself a little for hating it.
At 2:40, Claire returned to check Nora's vitals.
The contractions had nearly stopped.
Nora's blood pressure had improved.
Claire asked whether she could dim the lights.
Nora said yes.
Ryan said he was fine.
Claire gave him a look.
"You know patients are not the only people allowed to rest in hospitals."
"I'm not the patient."
"That's why your chair is terrible."
She dimmed the lights anyway.
After she left, Nora closed her eyes.
Ryan watched her breathing slow.
Within minutes, she was asleep.
He sat in the blue-gray glow of the monitor and opened his banking app.
For the first time in years, he searched old transactions involving his mother.
Two hundred here.
Seventy-five there.
Car insurance.
Electric bill.
Rent assistance.
A transfer labeled PAIGE TIRE because he had wanted to remember why he sent it.
Another labeled MOM TEMP because he had told himself the same thing.
Temporary.
May you like
It had all been temporary.
The list reached farther back than the app displayed easily.
