Chapter 12: Late

Jarrett shut the glass door of his office, and the sixty faces on the floor went on pretending not to watch.

Kiera sat in the chair across from his desk with her hands between her knees.

She looked as though she had not slept in a week.

I took the flash drive from her and plugged it into the laptop.

"Before you open it," she said, "I need to say what it costs."

"Go on."

"My mother had a stroke two years ago." She said it fast.

"She had no insurance. Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars."

"And Desmond paid it," Jarrett said.

"He bought it." Her voice cracked. "He bought the debt from the hospital, through a trust."

"He's never asked for a cent. He just reminds me, at the end of every week, that he holds the paper."

I thought of the way Desmond smiled when he was being kind.

"What do you want?" I said.

"Two things." She held up two fingers.

"The debt gone. And when this is over, my name on something I wrote. Not yours. Mine."

"That's fair," I said.

"You haven't heard the risk."

"Tell me."

"If I give you this, I've confessed that I stood on a stage and lied to six hundred people."

"I could be sued. I could be arrested for fraud."

"You might be," I said.

She flinched.

"I won't pretend you won't," I said. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll stand next to you in every room."

Kiera stared at me.

She looked at Jarrett, and then back at me, and her eyes were wet.

"That's it?" she said. "You don't want to hear me beg?"

"You walked in here with a flash drive," I said. "You did the hard part."

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