Chapter 31

Krista POVPatricia Owens was not answering her phone.I was on my feet before I had consciously decided to stand, the term sheet still in one hand and Rachel's voice still in my ear and the coffee shop continuing its ordinary Monday morning around me as if nothing had shifted."How long has she been unreachable?" I said."Forty minutes," Rachel said. "She called my office at ten twelve to confirm Thursday. My assistant spoke with her for three minutes. She was calm, she was clear, she knew the address. At ten fifty one I tried to call her back to tell her about Alex's courthouse filing and she did not pick up. I have called four times since.""Forty minutes," I said. "Alex left the courthouse and went to Memorial Hospital. What is he doing at the hospital?""I do not know," Rachel said. "My contact at the DA's office is trying to find out. The hospital is where Tyler is being monitored but it is also where Patricia Owens worked for eleven years." A pause. "She may still have contacts

Chapter 32

Krista POVThe Holland Tunnel swallowed us whole.Fluorescent lights strobed overhead in the yellow-white rhythm of every tunnel I had ever been in, and the traffic ahead compressed into a single lane of brake lights, and Dante drove with the focused economy of someone who understood that aggression was less useful than precision in a space where everyone was moving at the same constrained speed.I had Rachel's cross street on my phone. I had fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before Alex's driver cleared the Lincoln Tunnel on the uptown side.I used the tunnel time to think."Patricia Owens does not know we are coming," I said."No," Sophia said from the back seat."She does not know Alex is coming either," I said. "She thinks Thursday is the plan. She called Rachel this morning to confirm Thursday and then her phone went silent. She may have put it on silent herself. She may be at the grocery store. She may be completely unaware that this morning's courthouse filing changed everything."

Chapter 33

Krista POVPatricia Owens' living room was the room of someone who had been waiting a long time and had made peace with the waiting without letting it consume the rest of her life.Books on every surface. A small television. A kitchen visible through a doorway that smelled like coffee and something baked earlier in the morning. Family photographs on the mantelpiece, children and grandchildren in the ordinary accumulation of a life lived alongside the specific secret she had been carrying since the night she worked a NICU shift seven years ago and saw something she could not unsee.She directed us with the economy of a woman who had rehearsed this moment in some form for a long time."You," she said to Alex. "The chair by the window." She looked at me. "You, the couch. Your people can sit where they find space." She went to the kitchen doorway and then paused without turning around. "I am going to get the envelope. When I come back I am going to say everything I have to say one time. I

Chapter 34

Krista POVThe room did not know yet.Only I knew, and Sophia who was close enough to read over my shoulder, and the knowledge sat in my chest like something swallowed wrong, something that needed a moment before it could be moved through.Monica had not hired a driver to frighten me.She had hired a driver to finish me.The hit-and-run on Fifth Avenue had not been a warning. It had been an execution that failed. And Alex had stood over me while I bled out on the pavement and answered his phone and walked away, not knowing that the woman he loved had paid someone to put me in the ground and had simply miscalculated the speed or the angle or whatever clinical variable she had used when she planned it.I put the phone face down on my knee.Sophia's hand found my arm. Not squeezing, not performing comfort, just present. She had read it. She knew.Patricia Owens was watching my face with the careful attention of a woman who had delivered difficult information before and understood that th

All Chapters of His regret: Her revenge: Chapter 31 - Chapter 34

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34