They Broke Me, I Hid His Son novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Eight Weeks

In Zurich the institute shuts its door on Sabina, she faints, learns she is eight weeks pregnant, wins one bench with her original voice notes, and finds a Wexley lawyer's demand for $400,000 under her door.

The director of the Zurich institute let me stand in her doorway for a full minute before she looked up.

It was six weeks since the gala.

I had a rented room, a sack of cash that was nearly gone, and a coat that no longer closed.

"Miss Brunner," the director said. "I have seen the video."

"It's in German now," I said. "With subtitles."

"Yes. A board member sent it to me before you landed."

She was a lean woman in her sixties with a grey bun and no patience.

She set her pen down.

"I can't give you a bench. Our donors read the news."

"I'm not asking for a salary. I'm asking for one bench for one month."

"No."

"I've brought my data."

"I'm sure it is excellent," she said. "No."

I turned and walked out into the stairwell with my folder against my chest.

The stairs were stone, and the heating didn't reach them.

I got down one flight and the floor tilted.

I put my hand on the rail, and it didn't hold me.

When I opened my eyes, a young doctor was shining a light in my face.

The director stood behind him with her arms folded.

"You are in the institute clinic," the doctor said in English. "You fainted. When did you last eat?"

"This morning. I think."

He checked a screen. "Your sugar is low. When was your last period?"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

The last time I had thought about it, I had been in a ballroom.

"We'll do a quick scan," he said.

The scan was a grey blur on a small screen.

In the middle of it was a flicker of light, steady and quick.

"Eight weeks," the doctor said. "That is your baby's heartbeat."

I put my hand over my mouth.

The night before the gala, Quentin had stayed at my flat.

He had held my face in both hands and said that tomorrow he would tell everyone I was his.

I looked at that small flicker for a long time.

Quentin had dropped the bangle in front of two hundred people, and he had never asked me a second question.

This was the one thing he had left me, and he didn't know it was there.

"Do you want to keep it?" the doctor asked gently.

"Yes," I said.

It was the first thing I had decided on my own in six weeks.

The director hadn't left. She was still standing by the curtain.

I sat up and pulled my folder across the blanket.

"The recording," I said. "Will you listen to something?"

"I have listened to enough."

"Not that one."

I took out my phone.

It held four hundred voice notes I had left myself over three years, because I talk to my samples when the lab is empty.

I found the one from the week of the gala.

"Old money fools would have closed this lab," my own voice said, tired and laughing. "Quentin has soft hands, and he used them to save it. I plan to use mine to be worth saving."

The director played it twice.

Then she played the version from the video, off her own screen.

"Hold on," she said.

She ran them side by side.

"The pauses in the second one are wrong. They breathe in the middle of a word."

"They cut it. They cut it from this one and ten others."

"Who is they?"

"I don't know yet."

She looked at me for a while, and then she looked at my coat.

"Bench fourteen, by the window," she said. "One month. If your data holds, we will talk."

"Thank you."

"And if I see one more video, you're out."

"Understood."

"Eat something. Pregnant researchers in my lab do not faint."

She left the room before I could cry.

That evening I walked back to my rented room along the lake.

Snow was falling on the water, and I didn't feel the cold.

A thick envelope was wedged under my door.

The stamp was from New York.

The letterhead said it came from the legal office of the Wexley Foundation, with a second line: Copy to the Zurich cantonal police.

It was a demand for the return of four hundred thousand dollars.

It gave my address in Zurich.

Only the woman who had bought my ticket knew where I had gone.

I sat on the bed with the letter in my lap and my hand across my stomach.

Someone in New York had found me, and this time nobody was going to ask me a single question first.

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