Chapter 2 - The Question She Could Not Answer

“When did you last sleep?”

Samantha looked at Alexander Cole as though he had asked her to calculate the distance to the moon.

“Yesterday morning.”

He glanced at his watch. “That was twenty-two hours ago.”

“I know how clocks work.”

The words came out sharper than she intended. She rubbed her face with both hands, then immediately wished she hadn't. Her palms smelled faintly of hospital soap. The scar across her left hand looked silver beneath the cabin light.

Alexander leaned toward the partition. “Elias, please stop at the next safe place.”

The driver acknowledged him. Samantha stiffened.

“I didn't ask you to take me anywhere.”

“I know. You're leaving when you want to.”

“Then why are we driving?”

“Because I asked Elias to pull away from the hospital before I realized you weren't an expected passenger.” His expression tightened. “I'm sorry about the door. The rear child-safety setting was on. It's released now.”

Samantha tried the handle. It opened easily. She closed it again, not because she had decided to stay, but because a wet gust brought cold rain into the cabin.

Alexander noticed her glance at her phone.

“My ride left,” she said. “Apparently I missed the pickup.”

“Let Elias take you home.”

“I don't get into cars with strange men who insist they know me.”

“Fair.” He almost smiled. “For the record, you got into this one without being asked.”

She hated that she laughed.

It lasted less than a second. Then she remembered Lucy Kramer, and the small relief vanished. Alexander saw the change but didn't ask her to explain it.

“Did you really spend nine months looking for me?” she asked.

“I asked the hospital twice. They wouldn't identify the nurse who treated me. I hired someone to find a way to thank the team without violating anyone's privacy. We ended up delivering flowers to the department.”

“Two hundred flowers.”

“Two hundred arrangements, actually.”

“That makes it much worse.”

“I've been told.”

The SUV stopped beneath the awning of a closed office building. Elias remained behind the partition. Alexander put his phone face down on the seat.

“I remember something else about that night,” he said. “I remember asking you not to let them close the gate.”

Samantha's back straightened.

For a moment she was beneath fluorescent lights again, looking into a man's bloodless face. She remembered him fighting for a breath and trying to form words around the oxygen mask.

“The gate,” she said.

His eyes moved to hers. “You remember?”

“I remember you saying something about it. You were losing blood. We were concentrating on keeping you alive.”

“I've tried to explain that to the people investigating my crash. They say I was confused.”

“Sometimes injured people are confused.”

“Sometimes they're telling the truth.”

Samantha had no answer. A memory wasn't evidence, and she wasn't going to pretend it was merely because he owned buildings with his name on them.

“Why would a gate matter?” she asked.

“My car hit a barrier on a service road near the river. The report says the road was wet and I misjudged the turn. I remember the barrier coming down while I was approaching it.”

“Have you told the police?”

“Repeatedly.”

“Then I can't fix that.”

“I didn't ask you to.” He paused. “At least, not tonight.”

Rain tapped the roof. The silence inside the SUV felt different from the strained quiet at the beginning. Samantha checked the time, considered ordering another ride, and realized she might fall asleep before it arrived.

She gave Elias her address only after Alexander promised he wouldn't keep it or have his staff contact her without permission. Alexander repeated the address once to the driver and set his own phone aside.

On the journey, they spoke of inconsequential things. She told him the coffee in the emergency department tasted like burned cardboard. He admitted he had once complained about a hotel espresso machine because it took eleven seconds too long to warm up.

“Eleven seconds,” she repeated.

“I wasn't proud of myself afterward.”

“You shouldn't be proud now.”

“No argument.”

At her building, Elias stopped beneath a streetlamp. Alexander stayed in his seat while Samantha gathered her bag.

“You don't owe me a conversation,” he said. “Or anything else. If you ever decide you want to talk about March seventeenth, I can have my lawyer contact the hospital through the proper channels.”

She studied him. The scar by his temple looked smaller when he wasn't leaning toward her.

“Why reopen something that nearly killed you?”

Alexander watched rain slide down the glass.

“Because I don't believe it was an accident.”

He didn't explain further. Samantha was too tired to ask.

She got out. The driver waited until she reached the entrance. Her apartment felt strangely quiet after the constant alarms at St. Catherine. She set her keys on the counter, removed her shoes, and sat on the edge of the bed without switching on a light.

Lucy Kramer's mother had asked to hold her daughter's hand one last time. Samantha had stayed in the room because no one should have had to stand there alone. She could still remember that small, motionless hand.

She wasn't thinking about billionaires when she finally lay down. She was thinking about how some losses had no satisfying explanation, even when everyone involved had done everything correctly.

Across town, Alexander remained in the SUV outside his building until Elias asked whether they were getting out.

“Not yet.”

On his phone was a message from Maya Chen, the attorney conducting an independent review of the crash. He opened it.

The Port Authority has confirmed an eleven-minute gap in the service-road camera archive. It begins four minutes before your collision. Their contractor says it's routine maintenance.

Alexander read the message twice. Nine months earlier, he had accepted the official explanation because he had been too ill to fight it. Lately, the more records Maya obtained, the less routine anything seemed.

He called her.

“Tell me you have something beyond a missing camera.”

“Not yet,” Maya said. “But a former Cole Meridian employee contacted me this morning. She knows about the maintenance records. She's frightened.”

“Who is she?”

“She asked me not to put her name in a message. She says the gate was operated remotely that night.”

Alexander looked at the empty seat where Samantha had been.

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For the first time since March, someone else remembered the word he had been trying to say.

And somewhere inside his own company, another person appeared to know why he had said it.