After Faking My Death, I Refuse to Forgive Anyone novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Third Post

She returns to the dock for her spare phone and finds the trustee waiting with it in his hand, and has one night to decide whether to trust him.

I went back to the lake nineteen days after I died.

The phone under the dock was the only proof I had, and I could not leave it there through a November frost.

I came by the old logging road with my hood up and my new short hair tucked under it.

The moon was thin, and the house on the point had one lit window on the second floor.

It was my bedroom window.

Somebody else was sleeping in my bed, and I made myself look away.

The dock creaked under my boots, so I got down and crept along the shore side on my hands and knees.

The third piling from the boathouse was where I had taped the phone.

I slid my hand into the dark space beneath the planks and found nothing but wet wood.

Then a flashlight clicked on, and a man's voice said, "Third post, left side. Gray tape, the good kind."

I didn't scream.

I wanted to, but my body went still in cold water.

Calvin Sanborn sat on an overturned bucket at the end of the dock with a thermos between his knees.

He wore the same rumpled tweed jacket and had a wool scarf wrapped twice around his neck.

In his left hand he held my waterproof phone, still wrapped in its tape.

"I've been here every night for two weeks," he said.

"I figured anyone who taped a phone under a dock would come back for it."

I stood up slowly.

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

My voice came out lower than I intended, rough from the cold and from nineteen days of talking to nobody.

"Of course," said Calvin.

He took the lid off his thermos and poured something into it that steamed.

"I'm a trustee who walks the property at night. It's a hobby."

"This is private land."

"It's held in trust, actually. I'm the trustee."

He held out the cup.

I didn't take it.

"You cut your hair," he said. "It suits you."

"I don't know you."

"We've met," he said. "At your grandmother's funeral, five years ago."

"I handed you a tissue, and you handed it back because you thought someone else might need it."

I had forgotten that.

My throat closed up so suddenly that I had to turn my head.

"It wasn't one thing," Calvin said, quietly, as if talking to a frightened animal.

"The plug, and a wet circle in the boathouse dust where a bag had sat.

And your husband told the deputy you couldn't swim."

"I can swim," I said, before I could stop myself.

He nodded once.

"I know. Your state championship photo is still in the front hall."

The lake slapped at the pilings.

I could have run, and I think he knew it.

He kept both hands where I could see them and did not stand.

"I haven't listened to it," he said, and held the phone a little higher.

"It's locked, and it's yours. I only wanted to be the one who found it first."

"Why?"

"Because your family has hired a locksmith for the study, and a man to watch the dock," he said.

"They're looking for something, and I'd rather they didn't find it before you do."

My heart was going so hard that I could feel it in my teeth.

I thought of the papers in Neal's study, my own name typed above the word dangerous.

I thought of my mother's voice saying nobody would question it.

"There's a committal order," I said.

It was the first true thing I had told anyone in nineteen days.

"A doctor I have never met signed it. My mother and my husband signed it.

If I walk into a courtroom now, with nothing but a recording, they say I'm a woman who fled a hospital.

I'll be in a locked ward by the weekend."

Calvin's face did something complicated.

He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose and put them back on.

"I thought it might be something like that," he said.

"But I didn't think it would be so tidy."

"Keep the freeze," I said. "Keep every dollar frozen, and tell no one I'm alive. Not the police, not a priest, nobody."

"Done."

"You didn't even think about it."

"Your grandmother paid me to think about it for her for six years," he said.

"She said the trust needed someone to protect the girl from the people who loved her most.

I assumed she meant the husband.

I didn't realize she meant everyone."

I took the phone from his hand.

Our fingers didn't touch, and I was grateful for that.

"I don't trust you," I said.

"Good," said Calvin.

"I'm not asking you to. I'm giving you my number."

He wrote it on the lid of his thermos with a pen from his pocket, and left it on the bucket.

"There's one more thing, and you won't like it."

"Go on."

"Section nine gives me eighteen months," he said.

"Then the family can ask a judge to lift the freeze."

"They'll bring their doctor and their tears, and the court will give them what they ask for."

He stood at last.

He was taller than I'd realized, and he stood with his hands loose at his sides.

"I can hold it eighteen months," said Calvin.

"After that, they win."

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