Benson tracked her down at a coffee shop near her office and with my blessing told her exactly what he’d found. She near spilled her coffee. Benson told me afterward, didn’t know the half of what her sister was actually doing.
Thought it was some kind of legitimate estate planning. Once I laid out the fake biopsy, the affair with the doctor, she went white as a bed sheet. She didn’t know.
She knew there was a trust. She didn’t know there wasn’t a cancer. I sat with that for a long moment. Is she going to help us? She’s terrified, Benson said.
But yeah, I think she will. Pamela called me two nights later. Her voice shook the entire time. Patrick, I swear to you. I didn’t know Denise wasn’t sick. I thought I was helping set up a trust so the money wouldn’t get eaten by taxes if if the worst happened.
I believe you, I said, and I meant it. Mostly because Rage needs somewhere to go, and I didn’t have room in mind for Denise’s little sister. She told me you’d understand.
She said you two had talked about it. We never talked about it, Pamela. Silence stretched across the line. There’s a house, Pamela finally said, voice barely above a whisper in Oregon.
Bend, I think. Denise and Dr. Holloway have been they’ve been planning to relocate there after after the death certificate goes through and the policy pays out. My hand tightened around the phone hard enough that I heard the plastic creek.
She’s going to fake dying, I said. More to myself than to her. There’s a private clinic, Pamela said. One of Holloway’s old colleagues runs it. They were going to falsify a death certificate, some kind of arrangement where a real deceased patients paperwork gets.
I don’t even understand it fully, Patrick. I swear. I just know there’s a date. Sometime in the next few weeks, a final downturn that turns into an actual death on paper.
That phone call was the exact moment the plan flipped from defense to offense. Here’s where I had a choice to make. And I want you to understand both options because I thought about both of them long and hard.
Option one, blow it up immediately. Walk into that hospital room, throw every piece of evidence Benson had gathered onto her lap, and watch her face while I did it. Option two, let it play out.
Let her think it was working. let Holloway believe he’d gotten away with it and be standing there, evidence in hand, lawyer on speed dial, the exact moment they thought they’d won.
“Jerome predictably, wanted option one.
“Burn it down now, man,” he said, sitting across from me at the diner we always went to off Stockton Boulevard, one that had been slinging bad coffee and good omelets since before either of us could drive.
“Why let her keep playing you? Because if I confront her now, she’ll just adjust the plan, delay it. Maybe not even go through with the fake death, but she’ll definitely find some other angle to move that money before I can stop it.
If I let it play out, I control the timing. Jerome studied me for a long second, then leaned back in the booth. You’ve changed, man. Yeah, well, I stirred my coffee.
I wasn’t going to drink. Somebody’s got to I was about to become a better actor than either Denise or Dr. Holloway. There’s a strange skill you develop playing a role like that for weeks on end.
You start noticing your own performance the way an actual actor might. Cataloging which gestures land, which ones feel forced, adjusting in real time. I brought her flowers twice a week.
Sunflowers, her favorite, from the grocery store on the way to the hospital. I sat through updates from Holloway about declining white counts and concerning scan results that I now understood were entirely fabricated. Numbers plucked out of thin air to match whatever timeline they’d settled on.
“You’ve been so strong through this,” Denise told me once, brushing my hair back from my forehead the way she used to when we were newly married, and neither of us had anything to hide.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you. You won’t have to find out,” I said, and let her read that however she wanted. Once in the hospital cafeteria, I ran into Bridget, the younger nurse with the nose ring, getting coffee near the vending machines.
She smiled at me, the same soft, sympathetic smile she probably gave every grieving spouse who wandered through that building.
“How are you holding up?”
she asked, and I wondered, standing there, whether she had any idea that I now knew exactly what she and Rochelle had been whispering about weeks earlier. Some days are harder than others, I said, which was true in a way she couldn’t have understood. She’s lucky to have you, Bridget said, and walked off toward the elevator, completely unaware that her hallway conversation had detonated an entire marriage two floors below her feet.
