Prologue

MARCUS

Three years is enough time to memorize every crack in a ceiling.

I could tell you exactly how many there were above my bunk, exactly which one branched into two smaller cracks like a river forking around an island, exactly how the light from the hallway hit it at eleven each night before the guards killed the lamps for good. I had counted them so many times that counting them had become the only thing that felt like mine anymore.

Everything else belonged to someone else now. My name belonged to headlines that used it in the same sentence as murderer. My company belonged to my brother, who I'd handed it to on a silver platter the day I decided prison was easier to survive than watching him sit behind my desk. My wife belonged to him too, in the technical sense that mattered to a judge, though nothing about her had ever really stopped belonging to me, not in the sense that mattered to me.

And my daughter.

I didn't know her name for a long time. Liv had made sure of that, standing in this exact room eleven months ago in her expensive heels, telling me I was a ghost, a footnote, asking me if I even knew what my own child was called before she turned around and let the silence answer for her. I remembered how that silence had felt, worse than anything the guards had ever done to me in here, worse than the four years I still had left to serve on top of the sentence I was already drowning in.

I didn't know it then.

I know it now.

Grace.

Fitch had gotten it from the hospital records, buried in a paternity filing draft he'd prepared months before he ever told me he intended to use it, because good lawyers plan three moves ahead and never mention the ones they haven't decided to play yet. He said the name out loud in this same visitation room two weeks ago, like it was nothing, like it was just another line item in a legal strategy, and I'd had to sit very still and keep my face very calm while something enormous moved through my chest.

Grace.

Not Olivia. Not Eleanor, after our mother, though I imagine that possibility made Liv laugh out loud when it first occurred to her. Grace. A name that belonged to no one in either family, a name chosen fresh, a name meant to mean a new beginning, meant to erase every single thing that came before it.

They think a name can do that. They think you can call something Grace and the past simply stops mattering, stops reaching forward, stops being owed anything.

I have spent three years learning exactly how patient a man can become when patience is the only currency left to him. I have learned which guards can be spoken to like human beings and which ones require silence. I have learned which lawyers actually read the files they're paid to read, and which ones only skim for the parts that will make them famous. I have learned that a chain of custody form filled out in a hurry by an overworked evidence technician three years ago is worth more to me now than every dollar I ever made running that company.

And I have learned her name.

Fitch tells me the hearing is in three weeks. He tells me not to get ahead of myself, that a granted appeal doesn't mean bail, that bail doesn't mean freedom, that freedom doesn't mean anything is owed to me once I have it.

He's wrong about that last part.

Somewhere out there my daughter is learning to stand on her own for the first time, pulling herself up on furniture in an apartment I have never seen, in a life built entirely out of the wreckage I left behind when I chose the wrong woman to love and the wrong brother to underestimate. She has no idea I exist. She has no idea what her mother told me in this room, no idea what I told her mother back.

I'm coming for her next.

I meant it then. I have had three years, four hundred and some days if you want the number the guards use when they think it will break me, to decide exactly how much I meant it.

Three weeks, Fitch says.

I can count to three weeks. I have counted worse things than that in this room.