Chapter 7 - THE RECKONING
Leah stared at the screen for a long time.
Who is this.
Three words. No question mark usage she recognized. Her mother always used a question mark, always, even in texts — Leah had made fun of her for it at the kitchen table a hundred times.
*Who is this* — unpunctuated, flat, like the phone had been handed to someone else.
She didn’t answer.
She found Marcus instead.
He was standing at the end of the corridor with two men in polo shirts and a radio. He looked at her face and turned away from them entirely.
“What.”
Leah held up the phone.
Marcus looked at the screen. He looked for a long moment.
“Don’t reply,” he said.
“Why.”
“Because that’s not your mother.”
“Somebody answered her phone.”
“Somebody was holding her phone,” Marcus said. “Which means somebody got into a secure hospital unit tonight, or somebody in that unit is on a payroll we haven’t found yet.”
Then he asked, very evenly, “Why did you text her?”
Leah’s chin came up. “Because I wanted to know if she was alive.”
“Did you tell her where you are?”
“No.”
“Did you say anything else?”
“No.”
Marcus exhaled.
“Okay,” he said, and put a hand flat on the wall next to her head like he needed to lean on something. “Okay. That’s good. That’s very good.”
Something in her chest loosened by half an inch. Being told she’d done well by someone who meant it was not a thing that had happened to her in four days.
Then Adrian came around the corner with Celia, and both of them were walking fast, and Leah knew before anybody spoke.
“They found him,” Adrian said.
“Where?”
“Northern Italy. A house outside Varese.”
“Samuel?”
“Yes.”
“Is he—”
“He’s in custody. No chase. No guns. He was sitting at a table with a laptop and a cup of tea.”
Leah thought about that.
“Like he was waiting.”
“Yes,” Adrian said. “Exactly like that.”
The arrest took four hours to become real. By the time it did, Leah was in a car with tinted windows going somewhere she wasn’t told, and Celia was beside her, and Maya was asleep across both their laps.
Marcus, in the front seat, read the charges off his phone out loud because Adrian had told him to, and Adrian had told him to because of the promise he’d made on the plane.
Identity fraud. Illegal access to protected records. Forged medical credentials. Trafficking of documentation across four countries. Two counts related to minors.
“Only two?” Leah said.
“Only two they can prove tonight,” Marcus said. “There’ll be more.”
“And Gabriel?”
Adrian answered from the driver’s side.
“Zurich. He didn’t run.”
“That surprised everyone,” Celia said.
“It surprised me,” Adrian said.
Leah looked out the window at a road with no lights on it.
“When do I get to talk to my mom?”
Nobody answered for a while.
Then Celia said, “She asked for you. An hour ago. She woke up enough to ask.”
Leah’s eyes filled so fast she had to turn her head all the way to the window.
The video call happened at nine in the morning in a small office with a bad chair and a lamp that hummed.
Celia held the tablet. Maya sat on Leah’s lap with the rabbit — the rabbit, whole, sewn, breathing nothing — pressed under her chin.
Rachel Bennett’s face came up on the screen.
I.V. line. Bruise blooming along one cheekbone. Hair flat on one side. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
For a few seconds nobody said anything at all.
Then her mother smiled.
“Hi, baby.”
Leah cried.
“I’m not a baby.”
“You are to me.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
“Good.”
Maya leaned forward. “Mommy!”
Her mother’s face broke. She put her hand over her mouth and then took it away and said, “I miss you. I miss you so much.”
“Leah took me on a plane.”
“I heard.”
Leah looked down at the table.
Her mother’s expression changed.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For all of it.”
“That’s too many things.”
A tiny smile, gone as fast as it came. “Yes.”
Then she got serious, and the seriousness was the same seriousness Leah had seen a hundred times across a kitchen table she’d never sit at again.
“I should have told you more.”
“Yes.”
“I should have asked for help earlier.”
“Yes.”
“I should never have let you become responsible for keeping Maya safe.”
Leah’s throat closed up completely.
“I was good at it.”
“You were.” Her mother’s voice cracked. “That doesn’t mean you should have had to be.”
Leah looked away from the screen and breathed through her nose, and when she looked back, she had one question and she asked it flat, the way you pull a splinter.
“Dad didn’t drown by accident.”
Her mother’s face emptied.
“Leah—”
“Did he.”
Silence on the line. The lamp hummed.
“Mom.”
“I don’t know,” her mother said finally. “I have spent eleven years not knowing. I have a file. I have a date. I have a man who was there. I do not have a single thing I can prove.”
Leah closed her eyes.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
“That’s the worst answer.”
“I know.” Her mother’s voice was steady now, in a way that was somehow worse than crying. “I know it is. But it’s the true one.”
There was a long quiet.
Then a voice from off-camera said something in Italian, and Leah heard Adrian before she saw him lean into the frame.
“Rachel.”
Her mother stared at the screen. “Adrian Vale.”
“You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
They both smiled, and it was awful and familiar all at once, and Leah understood for the first time that these two people had once known each other well enough to be cruel to each other cheaply.
Then her mother saw the baby asleep in the carrier behind him.
“Your son?”
“Yes.”
“Cute.”
“He screams.”
“I heard.”
“I fixed him,” Leah said.
Adrian looked at her, deeply offended. “You assisted.”
“You were doing it wrong.”
Her mother laughed so hard she winced and pressed a hand to her ribs, and for one second everything on the screen was normal.
Then Leah said, “I’m not going to stop asking.”
“I know.”
“About Dad.”
“I know.”
“And about the letter.”
Her mother went still. “You found the letter.”
“Celia gave it to me. I read the blue tin part.” Leah held her gaze. “Somebody took it. The packet. Two weeks ago, maybe three.”
Nobody on the screen moved.
Then her mother’s eyes changed, and Leah watched her mother do the same math she’d done in the windowless room, and watched her arrive at the same place.
“Then he already had what he needed,” Rachel said quietly. “He didn’t need to take you.”
“He needed to take us to use it,” Leah said. “That’s what Marcus thinks. A packet only works if the child comes with it.”
Her mother closed her eyes.
“Leah.”
“What.”
“Come here. When they let you. Come here and sit with me and I will tell you everything I know, in order, all of it, no matter how bad it makes me look.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Leah nodded once. That was all she could do.
Then the screen went dark, and the room was just a room again, with a bad chair and a humming lamp, and Maya asleep across her lap, and a rabbit with one ear that weighed a grain of rice less than it had yesterday.
Marcus came in and stood in the doorway for a moment before he spoke.
“Adrian.”
“What.”
May you like
“Gabriel wants to talk. In Zurich, in person, with counsel. He’s asking to talk to Leah.”
Leah’s head came up.
