Cut Off
They went through Priya's files until nearly midnight — witness statements never officially entered, a single blurry photograph of tire tracks near the estate's service road, a note in the margin of the original report reading family uncooperative, underlined twice. None of it was proof. All of it was smoke, and smoke meant fire.
Odette got back to the estate past 1 a.m. and drove straight to the nursing wing instead of the house.
The night nurse, a kind-eyed woman named Osei who'd softened toward Odette over the past two days, let her in without argument. "He's been more alert tonight," she said. "Asking for you again, actually."
Abel's eyes opened when she took his hand. Clearer than they'd been the night before, like some private storm inside him had briefly passed.
"You found the box," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I found it. Abel, what happened to Celeste?"
His grip on her fingers tightened, urgent now, like a man racing a clock he could feel ticking louder by the second. "I need you to understand — I didn't know, not at first. He told me she'd left. Told me to help him carry—" His breath caught, rattling. "I helped him move her. God forgive me, I helped him move her, and I didn't know she was—"
The monitor screamed.
Osei was through the door in half a second, shouting for the doctor, hands moving fast over Abel's chest as his back arched and his eyes rolled white. More staff flooded in, a crash cart rattling down the hall, someone's arm pulling Odette bodily out of the room.
Through the closing door she caught one last look at Abel's face — slack now, machines fighting to hold him in the world — and heard the flat, endless tone of a heart that had, for one terrible stretch of seconds, simply stopped.
She didn't know if he'd said everything.
She didn't know if he'd get the chance to finish.