"Then make it smaller. Retraction, statement, injunction against the accounts, whatever Carmen can build by Friday. I will hold Halcyon off. But if that video is still circulating when their board votes on the final terms, I will not protect you."
"Understood," I said.
I spent the morning in a conference room with Carmen Diaz and two associates, building a war plan out of nothing. Carmen was twenty-eight and brilliant and looked at me with the careful expression people wear around the recently bereaved.
"The video was uploaded at eleven fourteen last night," she said. "First account was anonymous. Reposts picked it up by one a.m. The hashtag #VanceSterling started trending around four."
"Who filmed it?"
"Unknown. A bystander." She hesitated. "Eleanor, have you ever had a custody matter? Anything on record that could connect you to this child?"
My pen stopped moving. "No."
"Because if there's a file somewhere, a sealed matter, a relative's filing, we need to know before a reporter finds it."
"There is no file." I looked at her until she looked away. "This is a shakedown, Carmen. Find me who profits."
At noon I had a status conference downtown that I could have sent a junior to cover, and I went myself, because I needed a courtroom the way other people need air.
Thomas brought the car around to the garage entrance at twelve thirty. The rain had stopped but the streets were still wet, and the sedan moved through them with its usual unhurried dignity. I opened my brief on my lap and read the same paragraph four times.
On Canal Street he said, "Are you all right, Ms. Vance?"
I looked up. In the rearview mirror his eyes met mine, dry and steady, the eyes of a man who had driven me for nine years and had seen every version of me there was.
"I'm fine, Thomas."
"You haven't eaten today."
"I'm not hungry."
"Your sister," he said carefully, "used to say that too, right before she fell over."
The breath went out of me like I had been struck. I gripped the seat edge with both hands. For one terrible second the armor cracked wide open and I could feel everything underneath it, the rain and the screaming and the photograph and the word Mom in that boy's mouth, all of it rising at once.
"Thomas," I said, and my voice was not my voice. "Please. Not today."
He nodded once and said nothing more, and I buried myself in the brief and read the same paragraph a fifth time until the shaking stopped.
At three in the morning the loft was dark and I was still awake, sitting at the kitchen counter with my phone in my hand.
I had told Sterling it was a shakedown. I had told Carmen there was no file. I had told Thomas I was fine. Three statements, three people, and my hands were shaking again, because somewhere under all the denials a memory kept knocking that I could not let in.
I opened my contacts. I scrolled down to the Vs. There it was, unchanged for eleven years: Claire, cell.
I knew it was disconnected. I had known since the month after the crash, when the carrier reclaimed the number and the voicemail box went dead. I pressed the name anyway, and put the phone to my ear, and listened to the recorded voice telling me the number was no longer in service.
I sat there for a long time after the call ended, holding the phone, and I did not know what I had wanted her to say.
Chapter 4: Eleven Years Ago
I am thirty-eight, a senior partner at Vance and Sterling, and the memory starts the same way every time. Not with the crash. With her laugh.
Claire was twenty-seven that autumn, chaos with a heartbeat, living above a bakery on Lexington in an apartment that smelled of sugar and damp plaster. Noah slept in a laundry basket lined with her college hoodie, because she refused to buy a bassinet.
"You spent four thousand dollars on a coat," she said, bouncing him against her shoulder, "and you are judging my basket."
"It is a basket, Claire."
"It is a Moses basket. He is my Moses. You are the uptight aunt who brings spreadsheets to baptisms."
"There was no baptism."
"Minor detail." She grinned, the crooked Vance grin, and pressed the baby into my arms before I could step back. He weighed almost nothing. He smelled like milk and clean rain. His fist closed around my index finger, and I went still in a way no deposition had ever managed.
"Say it," Claire whispered.
"Say what."
"Say hello to your nephew, Ellie."
"Hello, Noah," I said, and hated the way my voice broke on the second syllable.
He spit up on my trench coat, and Claire laughed until she had to sit down.
"It was slate gray," I said.
"Now it is art," she said, wiping his mouth with the hoodie sleeve, and kissed the top of his head, and looked at me with eyes exactly like mine except hers had never learned to be careful. "You are going to be the best aunt in history. Latin lessons. Spoiling."
That was October, and everything was fine.
In November, on a Tuesday, the rain turned to something colder, and I let her call go to voicemail.
I was in a partner meeting. The phone buzzed once against the conference table, and I turned it face down without looking. I listened to the message at ten that night by the office window.
"Hey, Ellie, it is me." Claire's voice, bright and breathless, Noah fussing in the background. "He drooled on your godmother card, which I am counting as his first word. Call me back. I miss your face."
I told myself I would call her in the morning.
Thomas found me at nine the next morning, his coat dripping onto the carpet, and told me to sit down. I remember thinking it was a performance review, which says everything about who I was.
"Ms. Vance," he said quietly, "there has been an accident."
Claire hydroplaned off Route 9 with baby Noah strapped into a car seat that saved his life and could not save hers. She was gone before the paramedics arrived. I did not get to say goodbye. I identified her at St. Francis at two in the morning, signing papers with shaking hands, while a nurse held her son, three months old, asleep through all of it.
"You are the aunt," the nurse said. "His next of kin."
"I am his aunt," I said. It was the only true sentence I owned.
The funeral was rain on an awning. Our mother stood under a black umbrella and did not touch me once. The casket stayed closed. I held Noah through the service, and he slept, and the minister mispronounced Claire's middle name, and I thought that she would have laughed.