Chapter 11 - My Dead Mother’s Name
My mother died in a car accident when I was twenty-two.
I identified her purse.
I chose the flowers.
I stood beside the coffin.
I watched it go into the ground.
That was the truth I had carried for five years.
Gideon Cross had just spelled her name while someone tried to poison him.
I sat in the rehabilitation center hallway and could not stop shaking.
Stellan crouched in front of me.
“Look at me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Selene.”
“I said I don’t want to.”
He sat beside me instead.
That was better.
Darius returned with the captured orderly’s phone.
“He was paid through a shell company.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Let me guess. Ava Cross.”
“No.”
He looked at me.
“Rose Hart Foundation.”
I stopped laughing.
“My mother did not have a foundation.”
“Someone created one three years after her death.”
Stellan took the phone.
“What does it fund?”
“Medical data research. Cross Biomedical is its largest contractor.”
The hallway tilted.
I whispered, “My mother was a bookkeeper.”
Darius looked at me.
“For who?”
I had not thought about it in years.
“A private hospital group. She never talked about clients.”
Stellan’s eyes met mine.
“Saint Catherine’s?”
I closed my eyes.
“Yes.”
Everything became ugly at once.
My mother had worked at the hospital where Fern was born.
Her name was attached to the company processing Fern’s blood.
And Gideon Cross knew her.
I stood.
Stellan reached for my hand.
I pulled back on instinct.
His hand stopped in midair.
“Sorry,” he said.
The apology was so simple it hurt.
“I keep forgetting you don’t know what to do with me,” I said.
“I know what I want to do.”
“What?”
“Fix it.”
I laughed without humor.
“You can’t fix five years.”
“No.”
“You can’t fix eleven months.”
“No.”
“You can’t buy back the nights I thought Fern might stop breathing because I couldn’t afford a better specialist.”
His jaw tightened.
“No.”
I looked at him.
“Then stop trying to fix the past. Help me find the truth.”
He nodded once.
“That I can do.”
It was the first promise he made that did not sound like an order.
I stood straighter.
“I want her grave opened.”
Stellan did not hesitate.
“I’ll arrange it.”
“No family judge. No Cross lawyer. No private cemetery favor.”
He nodded.
“Independent court order.”
“Yes.”
“Done.”
I looked at him.
“You keep saying that like the world moves when you ask.”
“It usually does.”
“I hate that.”
“I know.”
The cemetery records gave us the first answer before sunset.
The coffin had been buried.
The body inside had been cremated before burial.
I stared at the form.
“My mother hated cremation.”
Darius checked the authorization.
It carried my signature.
I almost dropped the page.
“I never signed this.”
Stellan’s voice went quiet.
“Same method.”
“What?”
“The Ava transfers used my biometric identity. This used your signature.”
Someone had been building false legal actions around both of us for years.
Darius found security footage from the cemetery office.
The original authorization had been delivered by a woman wearing sunglasses and a scarf.
The image was grainy.
Still, I knew the way she stood.
The slight bend in her right shoulder.
The ring on her index finger.
My mother’s ring.
I pressed both hands to my mouth.
“She’s alive.”
Stellan said nothing.
The independent cemetery clerk zoomed in on the date.
Three days after the car crash.
My mother had arranged her own cremation paperwork after she was supposed to be dead.
Then Darius found one more thing.
A visitor log from Saint Catherine’s eleven months ago.
At 2:48 a.m., thirty-four minutes after Fern was born, a woman signed into the private NICU wing.
ROSE HART.
My mother had been inside the hospital the night my daughter’s second identity was created.
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