Married to My Mourning

Victor Crane's Version

He was in the study.

She knocked. He said come in, without looking up from whatever he was reading, and she came in and closed the door and stood in the center of the room and said, "Crane called me."

He went still. The kind of still that was not calm.

"When."

"Ten minutes ago. Private number." She sat in the chair across from his desk — not perched on the edge, not hesitant, all the way back, feet on the floor, like someone who was staying. "He told me he had another version of events and I should call him when I was ready to hear it."

Damien set down what he was reading. She couldn't see his face fully — the desk lamp threw him partly in shadow — but she saw the movement in his jaw.

"He's fishing," he said.

"Maybe. But he also specifically said you tell me what you want me to believe." She held his gaze. "I'm not saying I believe him. I'm saying that's what he said. And that there is a name you didn't tell me. The first night. There was a gap, Damien. I felt it."

Silence.

"Rule three," she said. "You said I'd hear things from you first. This is me giving you the chance to do that before I sit with what he's implying."

He looked at her for a long time. The lamp moved between them. Outside the study windows the city was going about its bright afternoon business.

"Elena didn't only bring me information," he said.

Nora waited.

"She was trying to find something specific. A document — proof of payment that connected Crane to a particular transaction. One that would have implicated someone else as well."

A pause.

"Who?"

"My father's former attorney. A man named Reuben Clast. He's been in Crane's pocket for fifteen years. Elena found the thread. She pulled it." He leaned back slowly. "Clast found out. He told Crane."

"So Crane didn't kill her because of you," Nora said carefully. "He killed her because of what she found."

"Partially."

She heard the word. Partially. "What's the rest?"

Another pause. This one longer. The kind that preceded something real.

"Elena came to me," he said, "because she was trying to help me. She knew about Clast because I had confided in her about the investigation. She went looking on her own, without telling me. By the time I knew what she was doing, Crane already knew she had the document."

The room settled around this.

"She went looking because you told her," Nora said. "She put herself in danger because you shared information with her."

"Yes."

One word. Flat and undecorated, which was the most honest thing he could have given her.

"Is that what Crane wanted me to know?"

"Probably. He'll frame it as negligence. Or worse." His eyes were steady on hers. "It was neither. It was a miscalculation. I didn't know she would act on it. I didn't know she was capable of moving that fast or that quietly." Something crossed his face. "I underestimated her. That's my fault."

Nora sat with that. All of it. The truth of it and the shape of his guilt, which was real — she could see it, had been able to see it since the funeral, she just hadn't known what it was guilt about.

"She wouldn't have blamed you," Nora said, which surprised her as she said it.

He looked at her.

"Elena never blamed anyone for her own choices." She felt the ache of it, the particular ache of knowing someone perfectly. "She would have known the risk. She would have done it anyway. That was Elena." Her voice stayed even through effort. "She was always saving people she didn't have to save."

The study was quiet.

Something in Damien's face moved — just briefly, just through — and she saw past the controlled surface to something that was raw and old and had not been looked at in a long time. Grief, she recognized it. The kind that had been locked in a room and not given air.

"You should have told me," she said. "Not because I blame you. Because I needed to know what we were actually dealing with."

"I know," he said.

"Don't do it again."

"I won't."

She stood. Walked to the door. Her hand on the frame, she paused.

"Don't let Crane call me again," she said. "Put whatever you need to put on my phone."

"Already being arranged," he said. Quietly.

She nodded and left. And she walked back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Elena's photograph and said, very softly, to no one:

"You really liked him, didn't you."

The photograph smiled its frozen smile. Laughed its frozen laugh.

Nora pressed her fingers to the glass, gently, the way you touched something you were terrified of forgetting.

"Me too," she whispered. "That's the problem."