They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

Anastasia’s POV: The service stairs smelled like cleaning products and old carpet and the particular staleness of a space that existed only to be functional and had never been asked to be anything else. Elena went first with the fireproof box under one arm and her laptop bag over the other shoulder and I followed and Lucas came last and none of us spoke until we pushed through the door at the bottom and came out onto the side street. The cold hit immediately. Harlow City at two thirty in the morning was not empty but it was reduced to its essential self, the people who worked through the night and the people who had nowhere else to be and the occasional car moving through streets that belonged to everyone during the day and to no one in particular now. I stood on the pavement and looked both ways and saw nothing that concerned me and felt concerned anyway because the notes in that bathroom had been left by someone who had been inside Elena’s room without her knowing and that someon

Anastasia’s POV:I woke up on Marcus’s couch in the morning with a crick in my neck and the particular disorientation of someone who had fallen asleep in the middle of a crisis and was now being reintroduced to it all at once.The kitchen light was on.Lucas was already up, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and Celeste’s folder open in front of him and the particular focused stillness of a man who had either not slept at all or had slept briefly and efficiently and returned to work before anyone noticed. He looked up when I sat up and something in his face did the thing it had been doing since the airfield, settling when he saw me, like a tension he had been carrying released slightly.“Coffee,” he said. “Marcus made it before he went back to sleep.”I stood and poured myself a cup and stood at the counter and looked at the kitchen in the early morning light. The fireproof box was still on the table, closed now. Celeste’s folder beside it. Two extra cups in the drying rack tha

Anastasia’s POV:Patricia read for forty one minutes without speaking.I knew because I watched the clock on the conference room wall with the particular attention of someone who needed something neutral to look at while a woman they had trusted completely absorbed information that was going to change the shape of her professional life and possibly several other things besides.Lucas sat at the head of the table. Simone sat to my left. Neither of them spoke either. The only sounds in the room were the occasional turn of a page and the distant hum of Salvatore Enterprises going about its morning forty two floors below us as if nothing extraordinary was happening in this glass room above it.Patricia read Elena’s folders first. Then Celeste’s. Then the Renata file. She went back to two sections of Celeste’s folder and read them again with the focused attention of someone checking their own understanding rather than questioning the material. When she finished, she set the last page down

Anastasia’s POV: I did not move for thirty seconds after the call ended. I sat on the couch with my phone in my hand and my sketch notebook open on the cushion beside me and I looked at the door and I thought about the woman who had driven me here, quiet and plain clothed and unremarkable in the specific way of someone trained to be forgotten, and I ran back through every moment of the drive with the particular focus of a woman trying to find something she might have missed. She had not spoken unnecessarily. Had not taken a route I could second guess. Had used a keycard to access the building rather than a key which meant she had access that had been arranged in advance. Had shown me the apartment with the economy of someone who had been here before. All of those things were consistent with a professional doing her job. All of those things were also consistent with someone who knew exactly where she had brought me and who she had brought me for. I looked at the door. The

Anastasia’s POV:Edmund Salvatore’s study had not been touched in twenty years.Victoria told us this as Diane wheeled her down the hallway toward a door at the back of the house, and I understood as we walked that this wasn’t simply a room she had left alone out of grief. It was a room she had sealed, the way you sealed something you were afraid to look at directly, and the dust on the door handle told its own story before she even turned it.“I come in twice a year,” she said. “To clean. I don’t move anything. I’ve not moved anything in twenty years.”The room smelled like old paper and cedar and the particular staleness of air that had not been properly circulated in a long time. Lucas stood in the doorway for a moment before he stepped inside, and I watched him take in the space the way you took in a place that belonged to someone you had lost before you had any real say in how you would remember them.A heavy wooden desk. A leather chair, cracked now with age. Bookshelves on thre