Chapter Five

Freya

"I'm not dead."

The words came out of me flat, immediate, the way you'd correct someone who'd gotten your birthday wrong. A small, fixable error.

Angelina didn't move. "Freya—"

"I have fingerprints." I held up my hand, the IV tape tugging at my skin. "I have DNA. I have a passport with my photo on it. I have three hundred employees who've seen my face every day for six years. I have a signature on file with four different banks. I have a voice, Angelina, that people would recognize the second I opened my mouth. Dead people don't have any of that. So whatever paperwork someone filed, whatever lie my family told a room full of cameras—it's wrong. It's a clerical error. We fix clerical errors. That's—" My voice cracked, and I hated it, hated that it cracked, because this was not a moment for crying, this was a moment for solving. "That's all this is."

I was already listing the next steps in my head, the way I would for a supply chain problem, a contract dispute, anything with an actual shape to it. Call the Chicago consulate. Request an emergency passport reissue. Contact Caoway Textiles' legal department—no, not legal, they'd report to my father before they reported to me. Call Luke directly. He was different. He was definitely going to help me.

"Take me back to Chicago," I turned back to Angelina. "Today. I need to get on the first flight."

"No."

"No?"

"You are in no condition to fly, and even if you were, I would not be putting you on that plane." Angelina's voice hadn't risen at all. That was somehow worse than if it had. "Sit down, Freya."

"You don't get to decide that." My skin pricked with anger. "You're not my mother. You're not my doctor. You've only met me what? One day? And you're—"

"One year," she said. "It has been one year."

I ignored that, pulling the IV line loose myself. It hurt more than I expected, a bright, ugly sting, and a bead of blood welled up where the needle had been. I didn't care. I turned toward the door, dragging the pole a half-step before I let it go entirely, because I didn't need it, I was fine, I had walked through a forest with a dislocated shoulder, I could walk out of a hospital hallway—

"Mrs. Calloway." A man's voice called out.

My knees folded under me on the third step.

Standing in front of me was a young doctor, with tired eyes and English that came in careful, deliberate pieces.

"Ms. Calloway." He said softly. "You should be lying down."

"I need to go home."

"What you need," he pressed firmly, "is to understand what happened to you first. You won't make it if you work out of here now."

Then he told me how my left arm had been broken in two places and had required a plate and screws to set correctly. Three rib fractures. Internal bleeding that had required emergency surgery within hours of my arrival. A skull fracture. Weeks in an induced coma before my body was stable enough to simply be unconscious. And my face—

"There was extensive trauma to the facial structure," he was saying, though the words sounded hazy, like he was speaking under water now. "We performed reconstructive surgery to stabilize the bone structure and close the wounds. There will need to be further procedures. Multiple. Once you are stronger."

I lifted my hand toward my own face, and stopped an inch from my cheek, afraid, suddenly, of what I'd feel under my fingers.

Shaking my head, I swallowed hard to bun back the tears. "When can I fly?"

He blinked. "Ms. Caoway, did you—"

"When. Can I. Fly?"

He looked past me, to Angelina who has since caught up with me. She sighed, said something in that other language, and then, he nodded, gathered himself and his careful, rehearsed sympathy, and left.

Angelina waited until the footsteps faded away.

"You didn't hear a word he said," she said.

"I heard all of it." My fingernails curled tight into my skin. "But that doesn't change anything. "I need to go home. That's where my life is. My name, my identity. Everything I've ever built. It's in Chicago. I'll go home, sort this out, and it'll be like nothing ever happened."

"Home." Angelina repeated, and I didn't like the tone in it. "Before you run back to Chicago demanding justice from people who buried you, Freya, perhaps you should learn what home did while you were gone."

She reached into her bag, and brought out a tablet, dark-screened, and set it in front of me with a small, deliberate click.

I looked at it. I did not touch it.

I knew, somehow, in the pit of my stomach, exactly what was on it. The engagement announcement I'd already seen playing silently on a hospital television was only the surface of it. There would be more. Interviews, maybe. Statements. My mother's face, composed and grieving on camera in a way she had never once looked at me while I was alive to see it. My father, solemn, dignified, saying whatever a man says about a daughter he'd spent twenty years being embarrassed by.

"I don't need to see it," I said.

"You do."

"I know what happened. I was there, Angelina. I don't need a screen to tell me my husband let go of my hand." My voice was rising now, and I couldn't stop it, didn't want to stop it. "I don't need to watch my sister cry prettily for cameras about a sister she pushed off a balcony. I know exactly what kind of people they are. I've known my whole life."

"Then look at it anyway."

"No."

I pushed the tablet an inch away from me, like it might do something on its own if I let it get too close, like the truth on the other side of that black screen was something with teeth.

"This is all just because my parents think I'm dead," I said instead, and heard, even as I said it, how small it sounded, how much like a child insisting the dark corner of a room was empty simply because she refused to look at it. "They don't know the truth. That's all this is. They don't know I'm alive. All I need to do is go back to Chicago. And everything will be fine again."

Angelina didn't answer.

She didn't have to. Her silence said, more clearly than anything the doctor had told me about my ribs or my face or the year I'd lost, that I already knew the difference between they don't know and they don't care — and that I simply wasn't ready, not yet, to say which one was true.