Chapter 6: Let Her Stay Dead

Katrina's POV 

I stared at the ceiling for a long time after Spencer put the phone away.

The headline was still burned into the back of my eyes. My name, the timestamp, Investigation Concludes. The specific horror of understanding that while I was drowning in that river, someone was already on the phone making sure the story was written before anyone went looking for a body.

All in less than three hours. I'd been married to Nicholas for three years and his family had needed less than that to bury me.

"You've been staring at the ceiling for ten minutes." Spencer said.

"I think better that way." I turned my head toward him. "Someone actually ordered this. This wasn't rage. Someone planned it, paid for it and then made calls the second it was done."

"Yes they did." He said flatly.

"The car that hit me," I said. "Did you see who was driving?"

"No. The rain was heavy, and no plates visible from my angle." He paused. "I was behind you both on the road. I saw the vehicle pull out and accelerate into you, then drove off."

I pressed my hands flat against my stomach. The gesture had become involuntary at this point, my hands just went there, like they'd already decided that was their job now.

"If they find out I survived...."

"They'll finish the job," Spencer completed.

"And if they find about...." I stopped.

"They won't." His eyes went briefly to my hands. "Nobody knows. It's not in any records. Dr. Richard runs a clean operation."

Dr. Richard, who had been quietly updating monitors in the corner, looked up. "What he means is I've spent twelve years making sure nothing leaves this clinic that I don't personally authorize. Your exams results, the ultrasound, your vitals, none of it exists outside this room." She paused. "You and those babies are a ghost right now. That's actually the safest thing you can be."

A ghost. I turned that over. Katrina Lancaster Cruz was dead. Filed, closed and mourned. The investigation wasn't looking for her because as far as anyone official was concerned, the river had already done what the car hadn't managed to do completely.

"I have nothing," I said quietly. "The five thousand dollars was in my bag, which is probably at the bottom of a river. I have no job because I walked away from my residency three years ago for a marriage that just tried to kill me. I have no friends that aren't actually Nicholas's friends." I exhaled. "I have the clothes I was wearing tonight, and those are ruined, and I am lying in a clinic that doesn't officially exist."

"You have the degree," Spencer said.

I looked at him.

"The medical knowledge doesn't disappear because you left the program," he said. "You were in residency. That's not nothing."

"It's been three years ago." I said quietly.

"Medicine doesn't change that fast." He said sharply.

"Spencer." Dr. Richard said his name with a particular tone.

"She needs to hear it."

"She's been awake for thirty minutes." She said with that same time.

"And someone already ran a search on a Jane Doe admission in a forty-mile radius." He didn't look away from me. "She doesn't have the luxury of thirty minutes."

The room went quiet for a second.

"What are you saying?" I asked slowly.

He was quiet for a moment. "I have a colleague in a different city, legitimate program, someone who trusts my judgement and doesn't ask questions I haven't already cleared." He paused. "I can fund it. A new name, new record. You finish the degree, you rebuild. You go somewhere they aren't looking."

I stared at him. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would you do that?" I asked, not convinced. "You don't know me. I've been conscious for..."

"Thirty minutes," Dr. Richard completed.

"Exactly. You don't know anything about me." I said. "So why?"

Something shifted across his face. Like a question he was still somewhere in the middle of answering for himself.

"I don't know yet," he said. "I know it's not the answer you want. But I watched someone run yourm off the road and drive away and I can't explain it beyond that right now. All I know is I'm not built to walk away from what I saw tonight and call it someone else's problem."

The silence stretched. I looked at Dr. Richard, she gave me the smallest shrug.

"He's irritating," she said. "But he's not a liar."

I looked back at the ceiling. My ribs ached with every breath, my head was a dull, persistent throb, my hands were still on my stomach.

Two heartbeats, I thought. Two tiny, stubborn, impossible heartbeats that survived tonight when they had absolutely no business surviving.

I thought about that dining room table, Calista's hands folded over her stomach. The small, settled smile of someone who had already won and was just waiting for the paperwork. Nicholas looking at the table while his father slid the divorce papers across. Emma's voice smooth and final.

They had thrown me away and then decided throwing wasn't enough, and I had almost let them be right.

"Okay," I said quietly.

Spencer looked up.

"Help me disappear." I held his gaze. "I'll finish the degree. I'll stay dead until I decide otherwise." I paused. "But I pay you back. Every single dollar, I need you to hear that, I'm not asking for charity, I'm asking for time. There's a difference and it matters to me."

"Noted," he said.

"And nobody knows about the pregnancy." My voice was steady. "Not your colleague, not your contacts, Nobody."

"I understand." He said simply.

"A name," I said. "I'll need a new one."

"I'll get one tomorrow," Spencer said. "You have to rest now."

"Make it something that doesn't sound like it belongs to someone who got buried in under three hours."

He almost did the thing with his mouth, but it was the ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile.

"Get some sleep, Katrina."

I closed my eyes.

Katrina Lancaster Cruz was dead. Filed, closed and mourned by people who had written the ending themselves.

Fine, I thought, hands pressed flat against my stomach. Let her stay dead.

The next one will be harder to kill.

"Tomorrow," Spencer said quietly, from the chair beside me, "we start over."

I didn't answer. But for the first time since I'd walked into that dining room smiling like an idiot, something in my chest that had been in free fall found something solid underneath it. Just barely but enough.