Chapter 5
I left the bakery with Mara’s last words following me into the street. By the time I reached my hotel, the October wind had worked through my coat, but I barely felt it. I could still see the way her anger had tightened around her grief.
In my room, I set the contract folder on the desk and opened my laptop. The Sunday signing waited inside it, neat pages and confident projections. I pushed it aside.
First, I called Priya Shah.
“I need someone in Boston who can look for old hospital records without tipping off my company,” I said when she answered.
There was a beat of silence.
“Is this connected to what we discussed?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll give you the number of a local attorney I trust. Don’t use your company account, and don’t ask anyone at the hotel to make calls for you.”
“I won’t.”
She sent the contact. The attorney, Elena Park, answered on the second ring. I told her I was trying to locate records from a Boston hospital five years earlier, but I didn’t give her Claire’s name. Not yet. I needed to know what could be found before I risked making her name travel through another office.
“I can start with the details you have,” Elena said. “But if the records are sealed or archived, I may need more.”
“I understand.”
The call ended with no answers, only a list of dates I had to reconstruct. I pulled my calendar from the company server and searched the October five years earlier that I had spent in Boston. My meetings appeared in clean blocks: a dinner, a site visit, two days of negotiations. There was no space for the life I’d lost.
I opened my personal calendar, then an old travel itinerary. Claire’s final weeks came back in fragments—a missed dinner, a message I’d read in a taxi, a meeting I’d insisted couldn’t wait. At the time, I’d thought we were arguing over the ordinary strain of two people building separate lives.
Now every blank stretch looked less like a memory and more like something I had failed to examine.
I found June Mercer’s number in an old contact file. She’d been my executive assistant back then, before leaving the company to care for her father. When she answered, her voice brightened with surprise.
“Preston? It’s been years.”
“I’m sorry to call out of nowhere. I need to ask you about that Boston trip. Five years ago, in October.”
The warmth in her voice faded.
“All right.”
“Do you remember Claire calling the office?”
June didn’t answer immediately. I heard a soft rustle, as if she’d moved away from someone.
“I remember her calling more than once,” she said. “She sounded upset. I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Who took the calls?”
“I forwarded them to Victor. He said you were in meetings and he’d make sure you got the messages.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Did you leave anything for me?”
“I wrote notes. Victor asked me to send everything through him because he was handling urgent matters while you were away.”
“Did he ever say what Claire wanted?”
“No. Just that she’d called again.” June’s voice thinned. “I assumed you were returning her calls. Preston, I would have told you if I’d known—”
“I know.”
But I didn’t know. I knew only that she’d called, and Victor had stood between her voice and mine.
I thanked June and ended the call before my anger could turn on the wrong person. Then I opened the company-phone archive. It took three password resets and a call to the service desk before I could reach the old records. I kept my voice even while a technician walked me through the search.
My number. The dates of the Boston trip. Incoming calls.
The archive loaded.
Then it stopped.
A blank stretch opened across three days. No caller IDs, no durations, no voicemail references—just a deletion marker stamped with an administrator’s credential.
The same blank appeared on the day Claire had called the office.
I stared at it until the cursor blinked like a metronome. One missing file could be a technical failure. A missing set of calls, followed by a hospital number scrubbed from the same archive, felt deliberate.
I found the number buried in an old billing export and called it from my cell. A recorded message gave the hospital’s current name, then directed me to its records department. I ended the call before anyone answered. The number might mean nothing. It might be the first solid trace I had of where Claire had been.
My phone buzzed. A message from Elena: I can begin searching once you send the approximate date and any identifying information you’re comfortable sharing.
I typed the date, stopped at Claire’s name, then erased it. I wasn’t ready to let another stranger hold it.
The contract folder sat where I’d shoved it, its clean edges aligned with the desk. I opened it and found the page bearing my signature line. For years, I’d believed that when something mattered, I would know. That I would see the danger, ask the right question, make the call.
Claire had called. I hadn’t heard her.
By late afternoon, the hotel windows had darkened to mirrors. I put on my coat and headed for the garage, telling myself I needed air. The elevator opened onto a concrete level that smelled of wet tires and gasoline. Somewhere overhead, a car alarm chirped once.
I was halfway toward the exit when I saw Mara’s car.
A man stood beside it with his back angled toward the nearest stairwell. He wasn’t checking a tire or looking for a space. He held his phone low, then raised it toward the driver’s-side window.
The camera flashed.
I stopped behind a concrete pillar.
The man lowered the phone and glanced around. His face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it at first. Then he moved beneath the garage lights, and the recognition landed hard.
I knew him from the passenger seat of Victor’s town car. I’d seen him open doors, wait outside offices, drive Victor through Chicago traffic while I sat beside him discussing quarterly numbers.
Victor’s driver.
May you like
I lifted my own phone without stepping out from behind the pillar and silently captured the license plate. When I looked back, the man was still studying Mara’s car.
This wasn’t a shadow left behind by five years of missing calls. Someone was watching her now.
