Chapter 18: The Rehearsal

At nine that night I stood on my living room rug and tried to say my own name.

All evening the red box had sat behind my eyes: *Session ended. Access revoked.*

Six hundred and ten thousand dollars had gone to an account I had never seen, and I had just promised Nolan's mother her house.

Ezra had spent the afternoon on the phone with his partner and the bank.

All he had was "we're working on it," so we had agreed to rehearse what we could control.

"Mara Ostrow," I said to the lamp.

My voice cracked halfway through the surname.

Ezra sat on the arm of the couch with a legal pad on his knee.

He had pushed my coffee table against the wall to make a stage.

A pillow on top of it stood for the podium.

"Again," he said.

"I've done it nine times."

"Do it ten."

I took the hospital bracelet out of my pillowcase, where it lived next to the napkin.

It was a white plastic strip with my name, my birth date and a barcode.

The clasp had left a mark on my wrist the day I wore it in.

I snapped it on.

"I'm Mara," I said. "That's me on the slide."

It came out steady.

"Better," Ezra said. "Now the part after."

"I don't know what comes after."

"You tell them you're alive and you let that sit for one breath."

"And then?"

"Then Nolan reads the numbers. Then I answer for the fund."

I stopped.

"You answer for the fund?"

He put down the legal pad.

"There will be forty people in that hall who gave Halyard money because my name was on the term sheet," he said.

"They'll want to know why I wired it and what I knew."

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