Chapter 5: Her Name
Brooke laughed. It was the worst sound I’d ever heard in that room.
“He’s lying,” she said. “He’s always lying. He lied to her for six years.”
“That part’s true,” I said.
But the truth doesn’t need anyone to agree with it. It just needs paper. And by then, there was a lot of paper.
There was the speakerphone recording Brooke never knew existed, because Grant’s home office system saved every call to the cloud and Theo had found the backup on an old account Grant forgot to close. I’ll handle it. You don’t have to know how.
There was the service record from a garage in St. Helens, owned by Brooke’s cousin, who’d been paid four thousand dollars in cash the week before my accident and who, when Agent Nair visited, decided he didn’t want to go to prison alone.
There was Hal, who testified in a borrowed suit about a half-drowned woman under his dock who begged him not to call anyone.
And there was Marcy Pike’s DNA, which matched the woman in my grave on the first try. The state lab only needed someone to ask.
Brooke was charged with attempted murder and conspiracy. She pleaded not guilty. Then her cousin’s statement came in, and the recording, and the cash withdrawals, and in March she pleaded guilty to everything her lawyer could get the prosecutors to put on one page. Fourteen years.
Grant was charged with bank fraud, forgery, and perjury for the affidavit. The insurance company sued him for every cent of the five-million-dollar policy he’d collected on my death. He resigned from the company that had his name on the building. The board, my board, voted to change the name by summer.
He asked to see me before his sentencing. I almost said no.
We met in a plain room at his lawyer’s office. He’d lost weight. The swept-back hair had gone flat and gray at the temples. He wasn’t wearing the silver watch I’d given him on our fifth anniversary. He slid it across the table to me in a plastic bag.
“I don’t deserve to keep anything you gave me,” he said.
“You’re right.”
He took a breath. “When I went up there. To see her. I knew. The second they pulled back the sheet. Her hands were wrong. Her ears. I knew it wasn’t you.”
I waited.
“And I signed it anyway.” He covered his face. “Because if you were dead, the guarantees died with you. Because Brooke said everything would be fine. Because I was tired of being afraid of what you’d find. I let a stranger be you so I could stop being scared.”
“Her name was Joanna,” I said.
He nodded into his hands. “Joanna.”
“Say it again.”
“Joanna Pike.”
I stood. “That’s the only thing I wanted from you.”
He got four years. I don’t think about him much anymore. When I do, it’s mostly the moment in the boardroom when he finally looked at Brooke, and I realized he had never actually known anyone he’d lived with.
In May, Marcy and I buried Joanna again.
Not in Portland, under my name. In a small cemetery on a hill outside Longview, next to their mother, under her own. Marcy picked the stone. Gray granite, nothing fancy. Her name, her dates, and one line: She was looked for.
I brought white peonies. They’d been my favorite once, back when Laura had favorites. Now they were just the prettiest thing I could find.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” Marcy said. “You didn’t even know her.”
“She held my place for three years,” I said. “The least I can do is give hers back.”
Afterward, I drove down to Portland and parked across the street from the old Holloway building. The workers were up on a lift, taking down the letters one at a time. H, O, L.
I’d kept my new name. Elena Marsh had done nothing wrong, and she’d done a lot of things right. But in my wallet, behind the Kestrel card, I carry the old license now too. Laura Anne Holloway. Expired. Smiling a little too hard at the camera.
Paper doesn’t lie. People do.
I took off my glasses, which I never needed, and watched the last letter come down.
