“Hey.” She sat in the chair beside the bed. She took his hand, the one without the IV, and held it the way she used to hold it when he was small and had nightmares and she was 11 years old and the only one awake in the apartment.
“You scared me.” “I scared me,” he said. He looked at the ceiling. “They’re saying my access site is failing.
The fistula.” He said it with the flat precision of someone who has learned too much medical terminology too young.
“They might need to place a new one, which means I’d be off dialysis for a few weeks, which means we’ll figure it out.”
“Imani.” “Reuben.” She squeezed his hand once. “The trust is already set up. Mr. Briggs’s attorney put it in place 4 days ago.
Everything is covered.” She paused. “Including surgical procedures. I checked the documentation.” He turned his head and looked at her.
He had their mother’s eyes, wide, dark, and incapable of hiding what he was feeling.
What they were doing now was a complicated mixture of relief and something more complicated than relief, the specific discomfort of accepting help that had arrived from a direction you couldn’t have predicted and couldn’t entirely account for.
“Who is this man?” Reuben said. “Someone who needed someone to pay attention,” she said.
[clears throat] “And I paid attention.” He was quiet for a moment. “Are you safe?”
She thought about the East Wing, the 12 documents, Celestine’s face in the hallway when she understood what had happened.
The phone call to Callaway the night before. “She knows. I’m working on it,” she said.
She was back at the estate by noon. The day had a different quality to it, the specific tension of a situation that has accelerated past the point of slow management.
Callaway was in his study with the door closed and his attorney on video call when she arrived.
She could hear the measured, lawyerly cadence of the conversation from the hallway without being able to make out the words.
DeMarco met her at the service entrance and told her two things, that Celestine had not come to the property that morning, which was the first morning she’d skipped in 3 weeks, and that two men from a private security firm DeMarco didn’t recognize had driven past the estate’s main gate four times since 7:00 a.m.
“Not ours,” DeMarco said. He meant it as information, not alarm, but Imani heard both.
She went upstairs and she thought. She thought about the documents on the encrypted server, complete, timestamped, photographed in sequence.
She thought about Celestine’s last words in the hallway. “My lawyers are already there.” She thought about what that meant in practical terms, what it meant to have legal infrastructure already in place before the confrontation happened, which meant Celestine had anticipated this moment, not this specific version of it, not Imani in the service corridor, not the keycard copy, not the photographs, but the general shape of discovery.
She’d been ready for Callaway to find out. She just hadn’t been ready for how.
