Chapter 2: Sunrise
The doctor met us at a private clinic that did not ask questions in the waiting room.
Photographs were taken. A statement was recorded. My cheek was cleaned, my ribs wrapped, my bare feet examined for glass I did not remember stepping on. Arthur Vance stood outside the treatment room with two men who did not introduce themselves and did not need to. When I emerged, he put a coat around my shoulders that smelled of his office and not of rain.
“You will stay at the penthouse,” he said. “Not the house. Not anywhere Grant can perform an apology for cameras.”
I nodded. Speech still felt like it belonged to someone who had not counted slaps on a marble floor.
By the time the city turned the color of wet concrete, my father’s general counsel had already placed calls that did not sound like requests. Grant’s personal lines of credit, tied in ways he had never bothered to untangle from Vance Logistics’ goodwill and from board relationships my father still influenced, began to seize up. An investor who had liked Grant’s golf handicap more than his balance sheets received a folder that made the handicap irrelevant. A bank officer who had approved certain facilities on the strength of a marriage name discovered the marriage name was no longer a guarantee.
Grant called my cracked phone at 6:12 a.m.
I did not answer.
May you like
He called again at 6:19, 6:27, and 6:40. Vanessa’s number appeared once, as if her voice could rearrange the night. My father took the phone from my hand, dropped it into a Faraday pouch, and replaced it with a clean device that already held three contacts: him, the counsel, and the security lead who had found me on the curb.
“You asked for no mercy,” Arthur said. “That includes the mercy of listening to him rewrite what he did.”
