They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 16

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

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

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