Alle Kapitel von They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable: Kapitel 41 – Kapitel 50

Anastasia’s POV:We sat in that room for a long time after Harlan left.The fire had burned down and neither of us moved to do anything about it and the letter was still on the table between us and Lucas was looking at it the way he had been looking at things all evening, like he was trying to find a different conclusion inside the same information.“Say it,” I said.He looked up.“You already know,” he said.“I want to hear you say it,” I said.He was quiet for a moment.“Celeste,” he said.The name sat in the room.I had been turning it over since Harlan walked out and every time I tried to find a reason it was wrong I could not find one. Celeste who had appeared at exactly the right moments. Celeste who had known where Elena was before we did. Celeste who had built a case against Vane for four months without telling anyone and had walked into Patricia’s office on the night of the gala with information that had been perfectly timed. Celeste who had hired me specifically and had told

Anastasia’s POV:She called at noon.Lucas and I were still at the apartment. We had eaten breakfast, actual breakfast, eggs and toast and coffee, sitting at my kitchen table like two people who lived somewhere together and had run out of crises to manage. It felt strange and good in equal measure.My phone rang and we both looked at it.Patricia.I answered.“We found her,” she said.I did not say anything.“A property in the north end of the state,” she said. “Registered four layers deep to a name that took us six hours to trace. She was there when we arrived.”“Was,” I said.“She came willingly,” Patricia said. “No resistance. She was sitting at a desk when we walked in and she looked at me and said she had been wondering how long it would take.”I stared at the wall.“She knew you were coming,” I said.“She has known everything the whole time,” Patricia said. “That was the point.”Lucas was watching my face.“Is she talking?” I said.“She has not stopped talking since we put her i

Anastasia’s POV:Marcus called on Saturday morning and asked if I wanted to go for a walk.Not to talk about anything specific. Just a walk. Which was Marcus’s way of saying he needed to talk about something specific but had not figured out how to start yet.We met at the park near his apartment and walked for a while without saying much and the city was quiet in the way it got on Saturday mornings when everyone was sleeping in and the usual urgency had temporarily agreed to leave things alone.“Elena is moving out,” he said eventually.I looked at him.“Her own place,” he said. “She found something near the federal building so she’s close for the hearings. She told me Thursday.”“How do you feel?” I said.He walked for a few steps.“Relieved,” he said. “And something else I still don’t have a name for.”“You have been saying that for two months,” I said.“Because it’s still true,” he said.We walked past a woman with a dog and a man reading on a bench and a child running ahead of two

Anastasia’s POV:The Greymount hearing was on a Thursday.I did not have to be there. Patricia had made that clear twice and Dean had made it clear once and Lucas had said nothing about it because he knew better than to tell me what I did not have to do.I went anyway.The federal courthouse was a grey stone building in the legal district that I had driven past a hundred times without ever going inside and it smelled like old paper and institutional carpet and the particular tension of a building full of people deciding things that mattered.Dean met us in the lobby.He looked at me when I walked in with Lucas and then he looked at Lucas and something passed between them that was not quite resolved and not quite unresolved, two men who had fifteen years of friendship and fifteen years of complication sitting in the same space and had not yet figured out what the furniture arrangement looked like going forward.“Thank you for coming,” Dean said to me.“How does it look?” I said.“Good,

Anastasia’s POV:The house on Linden Street took seven months.The structural engineer had been optimistic in the way that structural engineers apparently were and the reality of restoring a house that had been sealed for fifteen years was considerably more complicated than his initial assessment had suggested. There were two weeks in March where it looked like the entire east wall was going to have to come down and Lucas called me from the site at seven in the morning sounding like a man who had not slept and I told him to let it come down if it needed to and he said that was easy for me to say and I said yes it was and he laughed which was what I had been going for.The east wall stayed.I went to the site on weekends sometimes, not to supervise, just to watch it become something. There is a particular kind of satisfaction in watching a space that has been closed off for a long time open up again and I had been designing spaces for long enough to know it never got less interesting.