Chương 2
My hands were wet enough that Face ID failed twice.
I opened Margaux's messages and found Friday's video.
There was Dad in a wheelchair beside a broad window, sunlight falling across a polished floor.
I shoved the screen toward Lucie.
"Explain that."
She watched three seconds.
"Play it again."
I did.
Lucie pointed at my father's sweater.
I looked at her.
"The sweater, Alexandre."
It was dark green with a small repaired tear near the collar.
My mother had bought it for him years ago.
"What about it?"
Lucie went to a cardboard box beneath the bed and lifted out the same sweater.
I stared at it in her hands.
"No."
"Look at the video date."
"Friday."
"Not the message date."
I opened the file information.
The metadata was incomplete because Margaux had sent it through a messaging app.
Lucie gave a tired shrug.
"She sends you old videos."
My father began tapping the mattress with his left hand.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
"Easy, Dad."
He pointed toward the table.
I saw nothing.
He became agitated and pointed again.
Lucie reached beneath a stack of newspapers and handed him a cheap spiral notebook.
He pressed it against his thigh.
His hand shook badly as he wrote.
The letters were almost illegible.
M A R G.
Then a number.
I bent closer.
"Two?"
He shook his head.
He wrote again.
200.
Then he jabbed the pen toward me.
Two hundred thousand.
My stomach tightened.
That was almost exactly the amount Lucie had supposedly stolen from my company three years earlier.
I looked at her.
She had gone very still.
"What does he know about that money?"
"More than you do."
"Tell me."
"No."
I laughed once because the alternative was shouting.
"You're refusing now?"
"I'm refusing to spend another night being interrogated by you."
"My father is lying on a camp bed in a warehouse."
"And where were you yesterday?"
The question silenced me.
Lucie knelt and began wiping broth from the floor with a towel.
"Where were you last week?"
I said nothing.
"Where were you last month?"
"I thought he was being cared for."
"You paid someone, so you stopped checking."
"I called."
"You called Margaux."
"She was managing his care."
"Exactly."
Dad squeezed my wrist.
I looked down at him.
His eyes were wet.
There was something worse than illness in them.
Embarrassment.
My father, who once refused to let me pay for lunch because I was "still his boy" despite owning three stores, was embarrassed that I had found him here.
I sat beside him.
The mattress sank beneath my weight.
"How long?"
Lucie wrung out the towel over a bucket.
"He's been with me five months and twelve days."
I stared at her.
"You've been taking care of him for five months?"
"Not very well."
Her answer irritated me because the room itself seemed to contradict it.
His medications were labeled by day.
A chart beside the bed recorded blood pressure, meals, exercises, and sleep.
Foam had been taped around the sharp corners of the crate.
A secondhand wheelchair stood folded near the wall.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"I did."
"When?"
"The first night."
"I never got a call."
"You blocked me three years ago."
That landed harder than I expected.
"I emailed you."
"I never saw anything."
"Maybe you should ask whoever manages your inbox."
My assistant filtered messages from addresses marked as spam or personal disputes.
After the divorce, I had specifically instructed her to remove anything from Lucie.
Dad tapped the notebook again.
He wrote one word.
SORRY.
I took the pen from him.
"Don't."
His face folded.
I had seen my father cry exactly twice.
At my mother's funeral and when my first showroom nearly went bankrupt.
This was different.
He was trying to speak through a body that no longer obeyed him.
Lucie came over and rested a hand on his shoulder.
"Arthur, breathe."
He looked at her immediately.
"Slow."
She breathed with him until the panic passed.
Watching them together produced a feeling I could not name without making myself smaller.
"Why you?" I asked.
Lucie kept watching my father.
"The clinic called the emergency contact in his old records."
"You were still listed?"
"Apparently."
"And you just came?"
She looked at me then.
"What was I supposed to do?"
I had no answer.
Three years earlier, I had thrown her suitcase onto the pavement outside our house while rain ran down the front steps.
I had called her a thief.
A liar.
A whore.
She had kept saying my name until finally she stopped.
I had interpreted that silence as guilt.
Now my father was alive because she had answered a telephone call at two in the morning.
I stood and walked toward the door.
Lucie spoke behind me.
"If you're going to Margaux, don't."
I turned.
"Why?"
"Because right now you have questions."
"I have documents."
"You have copies of documents."
"That's enough."
"For you, maybe."
Her mouth tightened.
"You confronted me with less."
The old wound opened cleanly between us.
"What do you suggest?"
"Verify everything before you accuse anyone."
I almost told her I did not need instructions from her.
The words reached my teeth and stopped there.
Dad made a soft noise.
He pointed toward my phone.
I called Résidence des Aubes.
A receptionist answered.
I gave my father's name.
Keyboard clicks filled the silence.
"I'm sorry, Monsieur Vance, but we don't have a resident by that name."
I gripped the phone tighter.
"Check again."
She did.
Nothing.
"Has he ever been a resident?"
A longer pause followed.
"I would need authorization to discuss historical records."
"My sister has been paying you for six months."
"I'm afraid I can't confirm any financial information without documentation."
I thanked her because my father had raised me to be polite to people who were not responsible for my problems.
Then I hung up.
Lucie had returned to cleaning the floor.
May you like
"What did they say?"
I looked at Dad.
