All Chapters of They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

36 Chapters

Chapter 11: What The Envelope Said

Anastasia’s POV:Lucas came back from the doctor looking like a man who had been handed good news and bad news simultaneously and was still deciding which one to feel first.Victoria was stable. No internal bleeding. Two fractured ribs and a concussion that the doctors were monitoring carefully but the prognosis was good and she was conscious and asking for Lucas with the particular insistence of a woman who had something to say and was not going to let a hospital bed stop her from saying it.He told me all of this standing in the corridor outside her room with the envelope still in his jacket pocket and his hand pressed flat against it like he could read what was inside through the fabric if he pressed hard enough.“She wants to see you too,” he said.I looked at him.“Me specifically,” he said. “She asked for both of us.”I thought about Victoria Salvatore and every Sunday dinner and every carefully aimed comment and every look that had said you are temporary in a language that requ

Chapter 12: Thirty Minutes

Anastasia’s POV:We left Marcus in the corridor with Dean.It was not a discussion. Marcus looked at me with those red rimmed eyes and I looked back at him and we had the conversation we had been having since we were children, the one that required no words, just the particular understanding of two people who had grown up in the same house and learned to read each other before they learned to read anything else.He was not okay. He knew he was not okay. And he knew that I knew it and that I was leaving anyway because there was something that needed doing that only I could do and he would have done exactly the same thing in my position and we both understood that without saying it.I touched his arm once on my way past.He covered my hand with his briefly and let go.Dean caught my eye over Marcus’s shoulder and gave me a single nod that said I have him and I believed it because Dean Mercer was the kind of man who meant every quiet thing he did and he had been meaning things quietly in

Chapter 13: The Hanger

Anastasia’s POV:Lucas stopped the car twenty feet from them and turned the engine off.We sat for a moment in the sudden quiet with the headlights still on and the two figures standing in the pool of light ahead of us and I looked at Renata’s smile and felt something move through me that was not fear and was not anger but something older and quieter than both of those things.Recognition.I knew that smile. I had seen it in my guest bathroom doorway and across conference room tables and in a hotel lobby corridor and every time I had seen it I had been looking at it from the wrong angle, reading it as confidence or calculation or the particular composure of a woman who was always three steps ahead.I understood it now.It was the smile of a woman who had decided that if she was going down she was going to choose the terms.Lucas opened his door.I opened mine.The night air outside was cold and smelled like jet fuel and dry grass and the specific stillness of a place that existed at t

Chapter 14: The Photograph

Anastasia’s POV:I did not show Lucas the photograph.Not because I was hiding it from him but because some things needed to be processed alone before they became conversations and this was one of them. I stood on that airfield with the cold air on my face and Isla Mercer’s message on my screen and I looked at the photograph for a long time before I put my phone in my bag and turned back toward the car with an expression I had spent years perfecting, the one that said everything is fine when everything was the opposite of fine.Lucas was talking to Patricia. Something procedural about the federal case and Fontaine’s cooperation agreement and the timeline for the inheritance documents. I stood at a slight distance and let him handle it and used the time to think.Dean.I had known Dean Mercer for two years. I had watched him look at Simone Carter across rooms with the particular careful attention of a man who was trying very hard not to be obvious about something he could not stop feel

Chapter 15: What Elena Took

Anastasia’s POV:I was out of my apartment in four minutes.I did not change out of what I was wearing. I did not make coffee or think about the fact that it was nearly midnight or consider whether showing up at my brother’s door at this hour was reasonable. Marcus had sent me two sentences that had removed every other consideration from the room and I was already in the elevator before I finished reading them for the third time.Elena is gone. And she took something with her that changes everything about Gerard Fontaine’s case.I called him on the way down.He answered on the first ring which meant he had been sitting with his phone waiting and that told me everything about the state he was in before he said a single word.“I’m on my way,” I said.A pause.“You don’t have to,” he said, in the voice he used when he absolutely needed me to.“I’m already in the elevator,” I said. “Don’t argue with me.”He didn’t argue.The drive to Marcus’s apartment took fourteen minutes and I spent th

Chapter 16: The Woman On The Other End

Anastasia’s POV:I put the phone on the table between Marcus and me and switched it to speaker.Not because I had decided to trust Elena. Not because the things she was saying had earned that yet. But because Marcus had a right to hear whatever came next in real time rather than through my filtered version of it afterward and I was not going to make that decision for him the way people had been making decisions for both of us for longer than either of us had been aware of.He looked at the phone when I set it down.He looked at it the way you looked at something that had the power to hurt you and that you were going to look at anyway because the alternative was looking away and he had been looking away for too long already.I nodded at him.He nodded back.“Elena,” I said. “You’re on speaker. Marcus is here.”A silence on the other end that was longer than the ones before it and had a different texture. Not the controlled silence of someone managing their presentation. Something rawer

Chapter 17: The Door She Finally Knocked On

Simone’s POV:I stood outside Dean Mercer’s apartment door for four minutes before I knocked.I know it was four minutes because I counted. Not deliberately. Just the way you counted things when your brain needed something to do while the rest of you was having an argument with itself about whether what you were about to do was brave or catastrophic or both and whether the distinction mattered at this particular hour of the night.It was both. I had known that before I left Anastasia’s apartment. I had known it when I put on my coat and picked up my bag and said I’m done being careful with the particular conviction of a woman who had made a decision she was not going to examine too closely until she was already on the other side of it.I was examining it closely now.The corridor outside Dean’s apartment was quiet and slightly too warm in the way of buildings that controlled their own climate regardless of what the season was doing outside and I stood in it in my coat that I had not t

Chapter 18: What Midnight Looks Like

Anastasia’s POV:Lucas arrived at twelve forty seven.I knew the exact time because I had been watching the clock in the way you watched clocks when you were trying not to think about what you were actually thinking about and the clock was the only neutral object in the room. My apartment felt different with the knowledge that he was coming. Smaller somehow. More aware of itself. I had straightened things that did not need straightening and made tea I had not drunk and stood at my window looking at the city for ten minutes before I accepted that what I was doing was bracing and made myself sit down instead.He knocked rather than buzzing from the lobby which meant the night security had let him up which meant he had been here enough times in the last few weeks for the night security to recognize him and that was its own small thing I filed away without examining.I opened the door.He was still in the clothes from the airfield. Dark coat, dark trousers, the slight dishevelment of a ma

Chapter 19: The Name On The Floor

Anastasia’s POV:The name Adrian said was Dean Mercer.I heard it and felt the room tilt.Not because I believed it. My immediate instinct, the one that arrived before thought or logic or any kind of rational processing, was that it was wrong. That Adrian had made a mistake or been given bad information or was repeating something Renata had told him from a federal holding cell with her own agenda still intact even at the end of everything.But I looked at Lucas sitting on the edge of my windowsill and I looked at Adrian sitting on the edge of my couch and I saw that neither of them looked like a man who thought it was wrong and that landed somewhere in my chest with a weight I was not ready for.“Say it again,” I said.“Dean Mercer,” Adrian said. “Renata told me he has been connected to the people above Fontaine for fifteen years. Since before Lucas founded the company. She said he was the reason Lucas had the capital to build Salvatore Enterprises in the first place because the peopl

Chapter 20: The Alderton

Anastasia’s POV: Lucas drove the way he drove everything, with a focus so complete it left no room for anything else, and I sat in the passenger seat watching the city thin out as we moved west and I thought about Elena in a hotel room not answering her phone and tried not to construct the reasons why. There were too many of them and not all of them were benign. “Talk to me,” Lucas said, without taking his eyes off the road. “About something that isn’t this. For five minutes.” I looked at him. “Why?” I said. “Because you’ve een inside your own head for the last ten minutes and I can hear it from here,” he said. “And because we’re twelve minutes away and there’s nothing useful either of us can do with twelve minutes except make ourselves worse.” He glanced at me briefly. “Talk to me about something else.” I thought about it. “When I was nineteen,” I said, “I designed a house for a class project. Not a room. A whole house. Floor plan, elevations, interior specifications. My prof

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