Chapter 1
My name is Emily Hale, and the night my mother-in-law held a hot iron inches from my pregnant belly, I was wearing a camera in my cardigan collar.
I want to start there because everything else that happened in that kitchen traces back to a button that was not a button. Ryan had sent it to me four months earlier in a padded envelope with a note that said wear it when she visits, not because I think she'll do anything crazy, but because my mother doesn't lose gracefully. I had laughed when I read it, sitting at the kitchen table with my feet up and the particular exhaustion of seven months pregnant in summer, and I had put the cardigan on a hook by the door and thought about it sometimes when Victoria called.
I was not laughing now.
Victoria Hale was the kind of woman who had spent decades making cruelty look like concern. She volunteered at the hospital auxiliary and served on the church restoration committee and remembered the names of people's children and used those names with the precision of a woman who understood that knowing a person's soft spots was the same as knowing them. She had looked at me from the first dinner Ryan brought me to, a waitress from a diner on Route 9, and she had made the calculation about what I was and what I was worth and she had been performing the conclusion of that calculation ever since.
What she had never bothered to learn, because she had already decided what I was, was that before the diner, before Ryan, I had spent three years as a legal assistant at a military family law office in Fayetteville, processing casualty documents, survivor benefits claims, deployment insurance riders, and every variety of paperwork that arrives when a family loses someone in service. I had processed those documents in enough volume that their format was as familiar to me as my own handwriting. The command seal placement. The notification protocol. The middle initial on the identifying block.
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The death certificate on my kitchen table had Ryan's middle initial wrong.
It was thick paper with an official-looking stamp and black letters that read CAPTAIN RYAN HALE — DECEASED, and it was a forgery, and I had known it was a forgery within thirty seconds of Victoria sliding it across the table, but I had not said so, because the iron was very close to my belly and there were two men in the room who were not lawyers, and the camera in my collar was still running.
