Chapter 4

Daniel slid my mother’s plot plaque from his desk drawer and placed it between us. The oval brass caught the lamp, but one edge curled upward where someone had pried it loose. CELESTE ROWAN covered the faceplate. Beneath it, the tips of the stamped letters in MARA HALE showed like teeth.

I pulled the authorization from my coat and opened it beside the plaque. My finger stopped under the notary’s date.

“You dated this while I was unconscious beside my mother’s bed.”

Daniel rested his pen across the page without reading it. He had already prepared his answer; I could hear that in the care he gave each word.

“You signed several documents before the hospitalization. The dates were completed when they were processed.”

“I remember what I signed. That authorization was not among them.”

He lifted the bent plaque and ran its damaged edge along the blotter, leaving a pale scratch in the leather. He watched the mark instead of me.

“You remember pieces when you’re under stress. Then you fill the gaps and treat the result as fact.”

I took the plaque from him. The metal snagged the lining of my sleeve, and I worked it free without letting him reclaim it. Its weight belonged beside my mother, not in his locked drawer.

“My name is under Celeste’s because you covered it. That is a fact.”

Daniel opened his hands over the desk as if I had brought him a problem he had expected. His calm turned my mother’s burial into another example of my bad judgment.

“I protected the family from a decision you made while you were grieving.”

I folded the authorization once through the false date. The crease split the notary’s seal. Daniel’s gaze followed my hands, and for the first time that evening, his answer slowed.

“Return the plot to me.”

“No.”

I pressed the plaque flat against the authorization. The bent edge cut through the paper, separating his signature from mine. I put his half in front of him and kept mine beneath the brass.

“You stole the place where I was going to be buried.”

Daniel pushed his half back with the pen. Blue ink spread across his fingertip, and he wiped it on the inside of his desk drawer before shutting the plaque’s empty space away.

“You keep using words like stole because they make you sound certain. You were not certain at the hospital. You were not certain at the cemetery. If you repeat these claims in public, people will see the pattern.”

I tucked the brass inside my coat and closed my hand around the torn authorization. He could call my memory broken. He could not make the metal vanish.

Daniel watched the place where I had hidden it. “Challenge my authority, Mara, and you may discover how many other decisions I’ve already made for you.”