CHAPTER 57: The Hospital

POV: Avalon Pierce

The hospital corridor smelled like every hospital corridor.

Antiseptic and recycled air and the stillness of a place where time moves differently than it does outside. Avalon had been in too many of them this year and he still hadn’t gotten used to it.

He stood outside room 214 looking at the closed door and felt something he hadn’t prepared for.

Selene had offered to come.

He’d said no.

This one was his.

Catherine was awake.

Propped against pillows, an IV line in her arm, a monitor doing its quiet work beside the bed. She looked smaller than he remembered. The composed woman he’d known his entire life was still present in her posture, in the careful way she’d arranged the hospital blanket over herself but something had been set down. He could see it the moment he walked in, the exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something for a very long time and had finally, involuntarily, put it on the floor.

“You came,” she said.

“You’re in the hospital.”

“I wasn’t sure that would be a sufficient reason.”

He pulled a chair to the bedside and sat without being invited.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Stress-induced cardiac episode. They were very specific about that distinction.” She looked at the window briefly. “Apparently testifying in federal court about thirty years of decisions you regret is physiologically demanding.”

“Thirty years?”

“They asked thorough questions.” A pause. “I told them everything, Avalon. Not just the Hale emails. Everything I knew about the company’s vulnerabilities, the relationships Marcus exploited, the full history.” She stopped. “Some of it involved your father.”

The room changed.

“What about my father?” he said.

“Things I knew and didn’t tell you. The reason why he died, the circumstances.” She looked at him directly. “It wasn’t an accident.”

He said nothing.

“Your father was building a case against a business partner, someone who had been defrauding investors for years. He was so close to going to the federal authorities.” Her voice was steady but he could hear the effort in it. “Then the car accident happened three weeks before he was due to meet with investigators.”

“You knew this.”

“I suspected it for years” She looked away. “I was afraid, I had a young son and I was alone and I needed to protect him. So I buried it. I built walls around the burying of it and eventually I became someone who was very good at not looking directly at things.”

Avalon stood.

He needed to move. So, he moved to the window.

Outside a delivery truck was navigating a tight corner with excessive optimism. Pigeons were on a ledge. A nurse was crossing the car park below with her coat pulled against the cold. Everything was ordinary, indifferent and continuing.

His father had been killed for telling the truth.

He stood at the window and let that become real.

“Who?” he said.

“The federal prosecutor has the name now. That’s why the testimony took so long.” She paused. “It’s distantly connected to Hale. The same network of people protecting the same interests across decades.”

“Did Nene know?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that for thirty years.”

He turned around.

His mother lay in the hospital bed looking at him and he looked back at her and thought about everything this woman had done.

And then he thought about her sitting in a federal courtroom for three days telling investigators everything she’d buried since his father died.

“Why now?” he asked. “After everything. Why tell them all of it now?”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Because Selene took a bullet and didn’t stop,” she said. “Because you stood in a deposition room and told the truth when lying would have been so much easier. Because I watched you both choose correctly over and over under circumstances that would have destroyed most people.” She paused. “I wanted to know what that felt like. Choosing correctly, even once.”

The monitor beeped its steady rhythm.

Avalon stood at the window of his mother’s hospital room and felt something shift in his chest.

“You should rest,” he said.

“Avalon—”

“I’m not leaving.” He moved back to the chair and sat. “I said you should rest. I didn’t say I was going.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she closed her eyes.

He stayed.

Selene was awake when he got home at midnight.

She took one look at his face and said nothing. She just moved along the couch and made space and waited.

He sat beside her and told her everything.

His father, the car accident that wasn’t, the thirty years his mother had carried the suspicion alone and the federal prosecutor with a name he still didn’t know.

When he finished she held his hand and didn’t try to fix it or reframe it or move past it before he was ready.

They sat in the quiet apartment while the city turned toward morning.

Some things didn’t have sufficient words.

So they used none.

Which was exactly right.

His phone lit the coffee table at 1 AM.

Diana.

A single message.

Call me, you need to know the name the prosecutor has before it becomes public.