Chapter 7: St. Anne's
The hospital was twenty minutes away.
Graham drove.
Claire sat in the passenger seat still in her wedding dress, the documents on her lap, watching the city move past the window.
"How did Clara find you?" she said.
"The charity gave her a list of solicitors who take pro bono separation cases.
My name was on it.
She called on a Tuesday afternoon.
She was very calm.
Very organized." He glanced at the road.
"She had been building her own file for years before she ever contacted me.
Names, dates, the original case number.
She had done most of the work herself."
"She sounds like someone who doesn't give up."
"She isn't." A pause.
"She's been fighting this since she was seventeen."
Claire looked down at the photograph again.
Clara, age 3.
Before.
"What happens to Eleanor?" she said.
"That depends on what the documents confirm and whether the other signatories cooperate.
At minimum, professional misconduct.
Possible crjminal referral for falsification of court records — there's a discrepancy in the authorization chain that suggests the separation was pushed through without proper judicial review." He indicated and changed lanes.
"It won't be fast.
These things rarely are.
But it will happen."
"She threatened me back there."
"I know.
I heard." He didn't look concerned.
"She has no legal basis.
You are a named subject of that order.
You have full right to access it."
They pulled into the hospital car park.
Graham found a space near the entrance.
Claire got out and stood for a moment in the gray afternoon light, a bride in a car park, holding a brown envelope.
A passing nurse glanced at her and said nothing.
This was a hospital.
Stranger things arrived at the door.
Graham led her through the main entrance, down a corridor, up one floor.
He had clearly been here before.
He knew which way to turn.
He stopped outside a door.
Room 7.
"She may be sleeping," he said.
"I don't care." Claire pushed the door open gently.
The room was small and very quiet.
A window.
A monitor.
A bed.
The woman in the bed was thin.
Dark-haired, like Rose.
Her eyes were closed.
But the shape of her jaw.
The way her brows sat.
The small scar above the left eyebrow — barely visible, almost nothing.
Almost.
Claire crossed the room and sat in the chair beside the bed.
She didn't speak.
She just took Clara's hand — carefully, so as not to disturb anything — and held it.
Clara's eyes opened.
They looked at each other.
"You came," Clara said.
Her voice was rough from sleep and something else.
"Rose found me."
A long breath.
"I told her she could do it."
"She was very brave."
"She always has been." Clara's eyes moved over Claire's face slowly, the way you look at something you have imagined for so long that seeing it in real life takes a moment to believe.
"You look exactly like I thought you would."
Claire's throat tightened.
She pressed through it.
"I have the documents," she said.
"Graham is outside.
We have everything we need."
Clara closed her eyes briefly.
When she opened them again, something in her face had eased.
"I was so afraid she'd get to them first," she said.
"She tried."
"But she didn't."
"No." Claire squeezed her hand.
"She didn't."
They stayed like that for a while.
Outside the window, the afternoon light was thinning.
Inside the room, the monitor beeped its quiet, steady rhythm.
"I used to hold your hand in the dark," Clara said finally.
"Do you remember that?
Or was it the other way around?"
"It was me," Claire said.
"You were scared of the dark.
I used to tell you that if you held my hand, the dark couldn't get past me."
Clara made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"I remembered that wrong."
"You were four."
"I know." A pause.
"I still slept with the light on until I was nineteen."
This time Claire laughed too.
It came out unsteady and full and completely real.
The door opened behind her.
Rose stepped in, slightly out of breath, still in her uniform.
She stopped when she saw them together.
Her hand went to her mouth.
"Oh," she said.
May you like
Just that.
And then she was crying, and Claire was standing up to hold her, and Clara was reaching out from the bed to touch both their arms, and the room that had been so quiet a moment ago was full of something that had been missing from it for a very long time.
