The Woman You Erased

One Hour

CHAPTER TWO: One Hour

The taxi driver kept glancing at me in the mirror.

"Miss, you don't look well. You want a hospital instead?"

"The courthouse," I said. "Please. Fast."

He drove fast.

I pressed my forehead to the cool window and watched Belmonte City slide past in ropes of gold light. I had walked these streets for three years as a nobody, in shoes I bought on sale, carrying grocery bags up the hill to the Sinclair house because Patricia said taxis were a waste. I had let them believe I was a poor orphan who had trapped their son. It had been easy. People see what they expect to see.

They expected a beggar. So a beggar was what I gave them.

The courthouse steps were nearly empty when I arrived. A clerk waited near the last desk, tapping his pen, ready to lock up. And there, under the cold white lights, stood Raymond Sinclair, taller than everyone, his suit perfect, his face carved from stone.

He turned when my heels hit the marble.

For half a second his eyes moved over me, and something crossed his face that I could not name. Then it was gone, buried under ice.

"You actually came," he said. "You look like death, Claire. Go home. Sleep. We'll talk when you're thinking clearly."

"I'm thinking very clearly." I walked to the desk. "Papers, please."

The clerk slid them over. Raymond's jaw tightened.

"This is childish," he said, following me. "You saw a photograph. Felicia took it to upset you, that's all. Nothing happened."

"I don't care what happened."

That stopped him. I think in three years I had never said those four words to him about Felicia.

"You don't care," he repeated slowly.

"No." I picked up the pen. My hand was steady now, strangely steady, the way things go calm in the eye of a storm. "I stopped caring somewhere between the tenth transfer and the night I stood in your rain and you never came down."

His eyes narrowed. "What rain?"

I laughed, and it turned into a cough. "Of course. Sign here, Raymond."

He did not move. "How much do you want. Just tell me the number. I know this is about money. It's always about money with people like you."

People like you.

I signed my name. Claire. Just Claire, the way he knew it, the small poor name I had worn like a coat over the real one. Then I turned the page and pushed it toward him.

"There is no number," I said. "I don't want your money. I never did."

"Everyone wants my money."

"Then you have never once, in three years, actually looked at me." I set the pen down. "Your turn."

For a long moment he stared at the signature line as if it might bite him. And then, because Felicia was in a surgery ward and his phone was buzzing in his pocket and he wanted this over, he signed. Fast. Careless. The same way he did everything that had my name on it.

The clerk stamped both copies. Three years, gone in the time it takes to press a rubber seal onto paper.

Raymond picked up his copy without looking at it. "Fine. It's done. Now come to the hospital. Felicia's family is a mess, and you're good at handling paperwork, insurance, the deposits, all of it. You can still be useful."

Useful.

I held my copy of the divorce to my chest and looked at the man I had loved for three years, and I felt nothing but a great, clean, echoing quiet.

"Raymond," I said gently. "Even if that woman is dying in that ward tonight, I will not send one more cent. Not for her medicine. Not for her nurses. Not for anything. That river is closed."

His head snapped up. "You're unbelievable. She could die."

"Then let the man who loves her pay her bills." I turned toward the doors. "Goodbye, Raymond Sinclair. Try to remember, one day, that you divorced a woman you never bothered to meet."

I made it to the top of the steps before the fever caught me from behind like a wave. The lights smeared. My knees went to water. I fumbled my phone out and pressed the one number I had not called in three years, the number I had promised myself I would only call when I was finally ready to stop pretending.

It rang once.

"Anthony," I whispered, and my voice cracked into pieces. "Big brother. I'm ready. Come and get me."

There was a breath on the other end, sharp, and then a voice I had missed so much it hurt.

"Claire? Where are you? Don't move. Don't you dare move."

The phone slipped from my fingers. The last thing I saw before the world tipped over was a long black car sweeping up to the curb below, and three men in dark suits stepping out fast, coming straight for me.