The Marriage I Don’t Remember

Chapter 9

We arrive at St. Catherine's at 12:47am.

His security team is already there. Two men outside room 412. One inside with my father. I don't recognize any of them. I don't want to. I want them to be invisible and efficient and not part of this story at all.

The attending physician meets us in the corridor. Young. Tired eyes. Slightly intimidated by the men in suits who appeared in his hallway without warning.

“Mr. Lancia had an adverse reaction to the secondary medication administered at 11pm,” he says. “He's stable. His vitals are recovering.”

“Who authorized the secondary medication?” Dimitri's voice is quiet. Dangerous.

The doctor checks his tablet. Frowns. “It shows a phone authorization from the patient's daughter.”

I go cold.

“I didn't call.”

The doctor looks at me. Then at his tablet again. “The call came from this number.”

He turns the screen toward me.

My number. My name.

Spoofed.

I look at Dimitri. “He called impersonating me. To get the medication changed.”

Dimitri turns to his security lead. “Find the call.”

Then he looks at the doctor. “The medication he was given. Is it reversible?”

“We've already administered the counteragent. He should be fully stable within the hour.”

I close my eyes. Just for a second.

One hour. My father has one hour of uncertainty left because someone made a phone call pretending to be me.

I open my eyes. Walk to the door of room 412.

My father is asleep. Monitors beeping steady. Color in his face.

Alive.

I stand in the doorway and let myself have five seconds of pure relief.

Then I close the door and turn back to the corridor.

I walk to the end of the corridor. Away from the security team. Away from the doctor. Away from everyone who needs me to be the woman who has everything under control.

I sit in a plastic chair against the wall and stare at the floor and try to hold myself together.

I almost make it.

He sits beside me.

Not across from me. Not standing over me. Beside me. In the same plastic chair, in the same harsh hospital light, making himself small in the way that large men rarely bother to.

I don't look at him.

“He's stable,” he says quietly.

“I know.”

“We have the call record. My team will trace it.”

“I know.”

“Zara.”

“I know,” I say again. And my voice breaks on the second word.

I press my hand over my mouth. Look at the ceiling. Breathe through it.

I will not cry in a hospital corridor. I will not fall apart in front of him. I have held myself together for six years and I can hold myself together for one more hour in one more crisis.

Except my father is in that room.

And I am so tired.

“Hey.” His voice is different. Softer than I've ever heard it. “Look at me.”

I look at him.

His expression is—open. No armor. No calculation. Just a man sitting in a bad chair at 1am looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room that matters.

“You have been carrying this alone for six years,” he says. “You don't have to carry tonight alone.”

I stare at him.

“I don't know how to do that,” I admit. The words come out smaller than I intended.

“I know,” he says. “Neither do I.”

And somehow that—his admission, the parallel of it, the fact that he is just as bad at this as I am—breaks the last thing holding me together.

I don't sob. I don't collapse.

I just lean.

My head against his shoulder. My eyes closed. One breath shaking on the way out.

His arm comes around me. Slow. Careful. Like he's not sure I'll allow it.

I allow it.

We sit like that in the corridor while the monitors beep behind the door and the night moves past the windows and neither of us says a single word.

I sit up eventually. Wipe my face with the back of my hand. I don't apologize.

He doesn't make me.

I look at my hands in my lap. The diamond catches the corridor light.

“I've been so angry,” I say quietly. “For six years. At whoever did this. At the system that let it happen. At your family's company.” A pause. “At you. Before I knew you.”

“I know,” he says.

“I came to your office to destroy you if I had to.” I look at him. “I need you to know that. I wasn't coming to ask for help. I was coming to burn it down.”

“I know that too.”

“And you still—” I stop.

“And I still what?”

I look at the ring on my finger.

“You redirected the car to the hospital without being asked. You held my hand when it was shaking. You ran beside me tonight.” My voice is steady but only just. “You didn't have to do any of that.”

He's quiet for a moment.

“No,” he says. “I didn't.”

“Why?”

He looks at me for a long time.

“Because somewhere between you picking my lock and insulting a senator and falling asleep in my chair,” he says quietly, “you stopped being a complication.”

“What did I become?”

He holds my gaze.

“Mine,” he says. “To protect.”

The word lands in my chest and stays there.

Not possessive. Not controlling. The way he says it—quiet, almost reluctant, like he didn't plan to say it out loud—makes it mean something completely different.

I look at him.

He looks back.

“Dimitri—”

His phone buzzes.

He looks at the screen. His expression sharpens.

“My team traced the call. It was made from inside Leandro Holdings.” He looks up. “From his office. At 11pm. While he was supposed to be at a board dinner with forty witnesses.”

I sit up straight. “He used a remote line.”

“Untraceable to him personally. But my team traced the originating server anyway.” Something fierce enters his eyes. “We have him.”

We sit for another moment. The weight of it settling between us.

“We move at dawn,” he says. “Before he knows we traced it. Before he can run.”

“We need the reverend's documentation and the call record together. Separately they're circumstantial.”

“Together they're enough.”

“Enough for an arrest.” I meet his eyes. “Is that enough for you?”

He understands what I'm asking. Enough for justice. Enough for my mother. Enough for his father.

He looks at the door of room 412. At my father's name on the board. At the men in suits who came because he sent them.

“It's enough,” he says.

I nod. Stand.

I walk to my father's door and look through the window. He's still asleep. Monitors steady. The nurse at his bedside adjusting his IV.

“I want to sit with him for an hour,” I say. “While he stabilizes. Then we go.”

“I'll be here.”

I look at him. “You don't have to wait.”

“I know,” he says.

Same words as before. Completely different meaning now.

I go inside.

The room smells like antiseptic and sleep. My father's hand is warm when I take it. His breathing is even. The machines beep their steady rhythm.

I sit beside him in the dark and let the hour pass.

Through the small window in the door I can see Dimitri in the corridor. He's on his phone, coordinating, building the case for dawn. His security lead stands beside him. They talk in low voices. He nods. Makes another call.

But every few minutes he glances through the window.

Checking on me.

I look down at my father's hand in mine.

“I found someone, Dad,” I whisper. “I didn't mean to. But I think I did.”

My father sleeps on.