They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 36

Anastasia’s POV:I read the message twice before I said anything.“They are already there,” I said. “Patricia did not say where.”Lucas was already reaching for his phone.“Call her,” I said. “Now.”He called. I watched his face while it rang, watched him stand up from the desk, watched his jaw tighten when she picked up.“Patricia. Where?”A pause. I could hear her voice through the phone but not the words.“Say that again,” Lucas said.Another pause.He lowered the phone slowly.“The storage facility,” he said. “Marcus’s unit. They went back to the unit.”Marcus stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor.“I left it open,” he said. “I left the door unlocked. I never locked it back up after we took the box.”“There’s nothing left there,” I said. “We have everything. The drives, the photograph.”“They don’t know that,” Lucas said. “They are going to search it anyway.”Victoria’s voice came from the doorway where Diane had wheeled her closer to hear.“Then let them search an

Anastasia’s POV:We divided the work the way you divided anything enormous and urgent. Patricia took the financial documents. Lucas took the company structures. Marcus took the names, cross referencing them against public records on a burner phone Dean had never touched. I took the timeline, building the sequence of events from the earliest document our fathers had produced to the most recent, laying out the full twenty two years in a way that would hold up in a federal courtroom.Elena made food nobody asked for and set it beside people without comment and it got eaten without acknowledgment and that was its own kind of language in a house full of people too tired for words.Diane sat with Victoria in the front room and at some point around three in the morning I looked through the doorway and found them both asleep in their chairs, Diane’s head dropped to one side, Victoria’s hands still folded in her lap in the particular posture of a woman who maintained her composure even unconsc

Anastasia’s POV:The eggs were good.Lucas was insufferably pleased about this and did not say so out loud which somehow made it worse. I ate and he ate and we did not talk about Whitmore or the drives or the Meridian Group or any of the things that had occupied every waking hour of the past week. We talked about nothing. He told me about a restaurant in Rome he had eaten at alone on a business trip three years ago and spent the entire meal wishing he had someone to share it with. I told him about a design project I had abandoned halfway through during the marriage because I had run out of time and space to finish it and had found the sketches at the bottom of a drawer eight months ago and started again.“What was it?” he said.“A community center,” I said. “Pro bono. For a neighborhood that needed one.”“Did you finish it?”“Not yet,” I said. “But I will.”He looked at me across the table.“I believe that,” he said.We stayed for an hour longer than we needed to and I did not feel gu