Page 46 of The Quiet After The Fall

He’s not here.

Shaking my head at my jumpiness, I flip through files, searching for anything having to do with Moretti or Thorne. I find a file labelled Victoria and grab it. It’s not what I’m here for, but why the hell does he have a file on my mother?

I drop it on the desk and squeeze my fist before opening.

It’s medical records. Prescription receipts. All of it with doctor’s names I don’t recognize. Different doctors from our main family primary. A quick flip through shows that these go back years. Even before the scandal.

Symptoms of depression and anxiety. Paranoia and mania. Physical symptoms like body shakes and shortness of breath. And there’s so many different medications prescribed…some that I’ve never heard of.

He’s known about her health issues all this time. That fucking prick knew how fragile she was—still is—and continues to do this to her. To all of us.

I’m fucking shaking, I’m so angry. If he were here right now, I don’t think I could hold back. I wouldn’t want to. I take a few breaths and open my tracking app out of habit, seeing it still empty, and close my eyes.

I have to find something. I won’t stop looking until I do.

When I finish skimming the second drawer, I shove my mother’s file away and yank open the third. It sticks when I pull it also, and I wonder how old this cabinet really is. My father’s always been for show. I’m surprised he’s kept this eye sore for so long.

This one holds manila files with no tabs. At least ten of them. I crack them open—most are empty, some hold what looks like old blueprints and contracts. Thorne’s name on them along with ours. A school they expanded. A townhouse project along the river—that one made them tons of money back then. A parking garage in the city.

Then I spot a file toward the back, almost hidden. I pull it out and peek inside. The document heading reads: Aldrich & Thorne Development—Wonder World, Phase II.

My pulse picks up and I keep going, photographing every page in the file.

Chapter 12

Sawyer

It’s just a class. I’ve been in plenty of classes before. I may have dressed in a shirt Mom would call a blouse, and ironed my jeans, but this is no different than any classes I took a few years ago.

Stop making a huge deal.

I pull into the community college lot, and double-check which building my first class is in, trying to find a spot as close as I can. The sun is scorching today, and there’s not a cloud in sight to dull its full wrath.

Lucky for me, the place is pretty dead with it being summer, and I find one right near the entrance. I grab my backpack and water bottle and get out of the car before I change my mind.

This place looks the same as it did years ago. The same brick buildings, the same faded signage, the same vending machines that steal your money. It’s all so familiar, it’s jarring.

I was young and falling apart last time I walked this campus, and now I’m older and still falling apart just in a different way. I’m nothing if not predictable.

I think about the irony of it the entire way to my second story classroom, where I find a seat in the back by the window. There’s already a few students in here. None of them dressed as formal as me. And why would they be? It’s a million degrees outside and I chose jeans and a dry-clean only blouse.

The room fills over the next ten minutes. Most people look to be around my age or older and that helps my chest loosen. There’s another blouse wearer…but she’s at least forty. Whatever, it’s still oddly comforting.

The instructor is a small woman, maybe five feet tops, with short curly hair and reading glasses around her neck. She has this resilient energy that I clock right away, like she’s seen and survived some shit.

She writes her name on the whiteboard in capital letters, IRENE LANEY, then turns and tells us that she practiced family law for twelve years before she burned out and decided she’d rather teach people how to fight than keep fighting herself.

I like her immediately.

She spends the first twenty minutes on an overview. Things like what a paralegal does, what the program covers, what it doesn’t. I take notes on my laptop. Then she starts walking us through different areas of law with a PowerPoint presentation, touching on each type with a few bullet points. Criminal, civil, corporate, personal injury.

“Wrongful death,” she says, her tone casual as she clicks to the next slide. “Most people hear that and think of slips and falls or surgeries gone wrong, but wrongful death is everywhere. A defective product. A negligent driver. A structure that wasn’t built to code.” She pauses and looks around the room. “Some of you may have seen a case like this in the news recently. The Wonder World accident upstate earlier this summer is actually a textbook example of how wrongful death claims intersect with corporate negligence when a third party is⁠—”

I don’t hear the rest.

There’s a sound in my ears, like someone’s flipped on a white noise machine. And this low steady pressure behind my eyes is the same feeling I get right before a migraine is about to destroy my entire day. I stare at the slide projected on the board and I’m aware that I’m frozen, that I’m breathing too fast, that I’m squeezing my hands together tight.

But I can’t force myself to stop.