Chapter 5

I wrote the statement at my kitchen table, the same table where I'd once made a list of jobs I did not deserve. This time the page filled up fast. Every sentence cost something. I wrote about the boat, the pills someone handed me that I never asked the name of, the three days that existed now only as a gap where my life should have been. I did not soften any of it. Isabella had been clear. Vague shame would not survive a courtroom. Only the truth had a chance.

By the time I finished, the sun was coming up and my hand ached from holding the pen too tight.

I had one more thing to do before I went to the shop, and it was the part I dreaded most.

I called Foster Lane.

Foster had managed my sponsorships for six years, back when my name was worth something to put on a car hood. We had not spoken since the season I crashed out of my own life. His voice, when he picked up, sounded exactly like I remembered, smooth in a way that used to make me feel important and now just made my skin crawl.

"Ransford Claine," he said. "I heard you were sober. Didn't believe it until right now."

"I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth."

"That's a big ask, coming from you."

"A woman named Celeste Marchetti is about to testify against me in a custody case. Someone from your old office called my ex-wife's lawyer before she ever came forward on her own." I kept my voice level, even though my hand was shaking around the phone. "Was it you?"

The pause on the line went on a beat too long.

"It wasn't me," Foster said finally. "But I know who it was."

"Tell me."

"You burned a lot of bridges on your way down, Ransford. Some of those bridges belonged to people with a lot of money invested in your face. When you crashed out, they lost millions in contracts overnight. There's a man named Reuben Zeft who never forgave you for that. He's the one who found Celeste. He's the one who's been paying her legal fees this whole time."

Reuben Zeft. The name meant nothing to me directly, and everything indirectly. I remembered the man's cold handshake at exactly one gala, years ago, the way he had looked at me like I was an asset on a spreadsheet rather than a person.

"Why does he care about a custody case? That has nothing to do with sponsorship money."

"It's not about the custody case." Foster's voice dropped low, the way it used to right before he delivered bad news about a contract. "Reuben lost a sponsorship deal when you crashed out, and he's the kind of man who never lets a debt go unpaid. I don't know exactly what he wants. But I know he paid for Celeste's lawyer, and I know he's not doing it out of concern for your daughter."

My stomach turned over slowly. "Why come forward now? Why not two years ago?"

"Because two years ago you were already gone. Nobody needed to push you out of a life you'd already left." Foster exhaled, and for a second he almost sounded like he regretted picking up the phone. "But you're trying to come back now. And Reuben doesn't want you to."

Foster had lied to me before. For sponsors, for contracts, for me, when a lie made everyone's life easier. I had no real reason to trust a word coming out of him now. But that was the problem sitting in my chest as I listened. Every piece of it fit too cleanly, too fast, the way a story does when someone has already decided what shape it needs to be.

I sat there with the phone against my ear, the kitchen suddenly too small to hold what I'd just heard, and could not decide if I was more afraid that Foster was lying to me, or that he wasn't.

"Thank you," I said, and meant it, even though the words tasted strange coming out of me toward a man I used to resent.

"Don't thank me. I'm telling you this because I owe your ex-wife more than I owe you." His voice hardened. "Get your act together, Ransford. Actually together this time. Because if Reuben gets what he wants, it won't just cost you your daughter. He'll make sure it costs you everything else too."

The line went dead.

I drove to the shop in a fog, the statement folded in my jacket pocket like something radioactive, Foster's words looping over and over. Old questions about that Monaco weekend that Reuben would very much like to stay buried.

Verane was waiting in the glass office when I walked in, and one look at my face told her something had shifted.

"What happened?"

I told her everything. Foster. Reuben Zeft. The idea that Reuben had gone looking for Celeste rather than Celeste coming forward on her own, and that whatever she was about to say on the stand might not be the whole truth of that weekend so much as the version he had paid her to remember.

She was quiet for a long time after I finished, turning it over the way she used to turn over a diagnostic report, looking for the flaw in the data. I watched something pass behind her eyes that was not relief and was not anger. It looked closer to fear, the kind that comes from realizing the ground you built your case on might not be as solid as you thought.

"If someone paid her to say specific things," she said slowly, "then I don't actually know what really happened on that boat. I've spent two years being certain of exactly one thing, Ransford, that you were the danger in this. And now I don't know if I've been protecting Mira from the truth, or from a story someone built for me to believe."

"I know how that feels. Foster could be lying to me right now and I'd have no way to tell."

"That's exactly what scares me." Her voice sharpened, urgency replacing the exhaustion I'd gotten used to seeing on her face. "Because if I trust you and I'm wrong, I put Mira in danger. And if I don't trust you and I'm wrong, I take her father away from her for nothing. There isn't a version of this where being careful is safe."

"Then we find out which one it is. Together."

"Together." She said the word like she was testing its weight for the first time in two years. Not correcting me. Just noticing it.

Neither of us said anything for a moment. The shop hummed on the other side of the glass, oblivious to the two of us standing very still in a room that suddenly felt smaller than it had five minutes ago.

Her phone buzzed on the desk between us. She glanced at it, and whatever calm she'd managed to hold onto broke apart in an instant.

"It's Isabella. My lawyer." Her voice had gone thin. "Celeste changed her statement overnight. She's not just testifying about Monaco anymore."

"About what, then?"

Verane turned the screen toward me, and I watched her hand tremble as she did it.

"She says she has proof you were using again. Two weeks ago. The night before you showed up here asking for a job."