Chapter 2 - THE COURTYARD STORY
Marcus recovered first.
“That’s absurd,” he snapped, pointing at Daniel’s badge as if volume could erase it. “She slipped. This lunatic climbed onto the railing herself.”
I tried to stand and nearly blacked out.
Daniel caught me at the elbow. “Don’t.”
Eleanor descended the last stair with her perfect posture still intact, though her mouth had tightened. “My daughter has always been impulsive,” she said. “Claire, please stop this before you make things worse.”
My daughter.
Not Are you hurt?
Not Call an ambulance.
The pain in my hip mattered less than the cold clarity of that sentence.
Daniel didn’t take his eyes off Marcus. “Both of you stay where you are.”
Marcus laughed once. “You think you can walk into my family’s home in a costume and start barking orders?”
Daniel tapped the body camera lightly. “I think I already recorded you threatening a federal witness.”
That landed.
A thin pulse started beating in Marcus’s jaw.
I forced air into my lungs. “You shoved me.”
Marcus’s expression changed instantly. “Claire, stop. You were upset. You grabbed the railing. Daniel didn’t see the beginning.”
“He saw enough,” I said.
“Did he?” Eleanor asked softly.
Daniel glanced at her then, and I saw it: caution.
He had the shove. He had Marcus’s line about the fortune. He had Eleanor’s line about nobody knowing. But Eleanor had just identified the weakness too. He had not seen what happened before the shove, and she intended to widen that crack until the whole truth fell through it.
Sirens sounded beyond the front gates.
Marcus turned toward the driveway, then back to me. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
Paramedics entered the courtyard first. Behind them came two uniformed officers and a plainclothes woman who spoke quietly to Daniel while I was placed onto a stretcher. He showed her the badge. She nodded once.
Marcus immediately switched tactics. His voice softened. “Claire’s been under tremendous emotional pressure since our father died.”
“Our father died eleven days ago,” I said through clenched teeth. “That doesn’t make me suicidal.”
Eleanor folded her hands. “No one said suicidal.”
Marcus had not said it either.
But both of them had been thinking it.
That was the story they were reaching for. Unstable daughter. Grief. Accident. Perhaps hysteria. Perhaps a misunderstanding. Anything but greed.
I was loaded into the ambulance. Daniel climbed in beside me before anyone could stop him.
“Can you tell me why the FBI was watching my family?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Because you don’t trust me?”
His eyes flicked to my face, then to the pain radiating through my body. “Because if I answer too early, I might tell you something that gets thrown out later.”
That was an infuriating answer.
It was also the first careful one I’d heard all day.
As the ambulance doors shut, I caught one last glimpse of the courtyard.
My broken camera still lay on the stone.
May you like
And Eleanor was staring at it as if it frightened her more than my fall.
📖 At the hospital I learned I hadn’t been pushed because of a sudden argument—but because of something much more dangerous than family grief. 👇
