Chapter 6 - The Exit Strategy
The two men standing in the gravel turnout didn't move toward me with weapons or threats. Their threat was entirely bureaucratic, wrapped in gray suits and folded legal parchment.
Suzanne Lockheart remained leaning against her Suburban, watching me with a cold, detached efficiency. “You signed the medical release and the privacy addendum on October 14, 2012, Stacy. Right after you got out of the hospital for your concussion and memory stutter. Your mother told you it was for insurance reimbursement. It wasn't. It assigned the legal guardianship of your public identity to a private trust managed by Robert's firm.”
My breath caught. The medical stay. The haze of painkillers and disorientation after I hit my head during my senior year cross-country meet. I had trusted them blindly because they were my parents.
“You can’t just erase a person,” I whispered, gripping the steering wheel.
“We aren't erasing you. We’re maintaining the perimeter,” Suzanne replied smoothly. “Your parents get to keep their home, Mitch gets his future, and you get to keep your job at the garden center—provided you stay fifty miles south of this county and never, ever look for a silver frame again. Drive back to Ruth’s, Stacy. Sleep it off. If you try to go to the police, the only thing you’ll prove is that you signed away your rights eight years ago.”
She stepped back, and the two men parted, opening a clear path to the road.
I didn't drive to Ruth’s. I drove three miles down the dark highway to the 24-hour diner where truckers and night shift workers drank stale coffee. I sat in a vinyl booth in the back corner, pulled out my yellow notebook from the glove box—the one with the tally marks—and turned to the very back page.
Underneath the dates of every banished weekend, I wrote down a new list: Robert’s trust. The 2012 hospital waiver. Mitch’s tuition receipts.
If Suzanne thought a piece of paper from eight years ago made me invisible, she didn't understand what I had learned on Ruth’s peach farm. You don't kill a damaged tree by cutting its branches. You look at the graft union, find where the weak stock was forced onto healthy roots, and you unpick the binding.
I didn't call my parents. I didn't call Mitch. Instead, I dialed a number I hadn’t used in three years—the direct line of Marcus Vance, a local journalist who had written a piece on Chilton County land zoning irregularities back when I was working inventory at the nursery.
“Marcus,” I said when he picked up on the third ring, his voice raspy with sleep. “You still looking into the Chilton land trust grants from 2004?”
“Who is this?” he muttered.
May you like
“This is the girl who knows why the Lockheart family has been paying Arthur and Martha Miller’s mortgage for a decade. Let’s talk about Claire.”
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