Chapter 7
Evelyn POV
I shouted at him to give me back my phone. The words came out clear inside my own head and went nowhere.
Bryce walked toward the elevator at the end of the hallway, and I stayed two steps behind him, still telling him that my father was waiting, still reaching for the arm of his jacket and feeling my fingers close on nothing.
He kept his shoulders level and his pace unhurried.
The elevator doors opened. He stepped inside, and I stepped in with him and stood at his shoulder.
He pulled my phone from his jacket pocket and scrolled through the message thread with my father — checking whether his imitation of me had landed.
Bryce read the reply twice, then locked the screen. His reflection filled the polished metal of the elevator doors: the line of his jaw, the collar of his jacket, the hand holding the phone that should have been in my hand.
I looked for myself beside him in that same surface and found nothing. No outline, no shadow.
I had known, in an abstract way, since I watched the sheet come up over my face. But seeing the space where my reflection should have been turned knowing into something physical.
My hand went to my own throat before I could stop it, and I stood there pressing my palm against a neck I could no longer feel, trying to breathe through a body I no longer had.
The light, the antiseptic smell, the distant sound of footsteps — all of it vanished at once.
Hart Group's main lobby. A table had been set up against the far wall, dressed in white flowers and centered on a framed photograph. My name on the small placard beside it.
The photograph was one I recognized — a shot from a family dinner two or three years ago, and I looked completely ordinary in it.
Employees moved past the table in small groups, speaking in lowered voices. A woman from the logistics department paused and set a single white flower at the base of the frame.
My father was standing to the left of the table. He was wearing the dark suit he kept for formal occasions, and his shoulders were not straight. His face was the face of someone who had been awake for too many hours and had stopped trying to hide it.
Bryce was beside him. He had one hand on my father's arm, just below the shoulder, and he was speaking in a low voice to the people who approached to offer condolences.
My father said very little. Bryce answered for him: a quiet word of thanks, a brief nod, the performance of a man holding himself together for the sake of someone else.
He had the expression exactly right — the dropped eyes, the controlled breath, the way he accepted a handshake with both hands as though the gesture genuinely steadied him.
I crossed the lobby and put myself directly in front of my father. I told him Bryce had killed me. I said it clearly, and then I said it again, and I reached for his hand and felt nothing beneath my fingers.
His eyes moved through the space where I was standing and focused on the wall behind me. He did not hear a single word.
The next thing I recognized was the long conference table on the fourteenth floor — the room my father used for senior leadership meetings, with the window that faced the river.
The table was covered in documents. I caught the Hart Group letterhead on several pages, and on one sheet near the center I saw the Northstar logo printed beside it.
My father was standing on the far side of the table. Bryce was on the near side. Two board members had pulled back from the table and were watching rather than participating.
My father's voice was raised — not the controlled anger I had heard from him before. He jabbed one finger at the Northstar documents and said Bryce's name like an accusation.
Bryce responded in a low, measured tone — something about timing, about what the board had already agreed to.
My father's jaw tightened because the answer explained nothing that actually mattered.
I moved around the table and placed myself beside my father. I told him to sit down, that his heart couldn't take this, that he needed to stop.
He couldn't hear me. He put one hand flat on the table and leaned forward and said something to Bryce — something about my name, about what had been signed — and then his free hand came up to his chest, just for a second, before he pressed it back against the table.
'Dad, please sit down. I am right here.' I wanted to say.
He drew a breath to speak again, and then the breath didn't come out as words. His arm swept across the table as he went down, taking a stack of documents with him.
He folded at the knees and went down hard against the carpet before anyone in the room had moved.
I dropped beside him. My hands went through his shoulders, through his arms, through the fabric of the suit he had owned since before I was born.
I was on my knees calling his name, and the sound stayed perfectly contained inside my own head, and the people in the room were finally reaching for phones.
Bryce was standing on the other side of the table, looking down at my father on the floor with an expression I could not read from where I knelt.
I did not move from the floor.
I looked at the documents scattered around my father's body and understood what I was seeing.
The Northstar name beside the Hart name on the same page. The signature lines. The resources I had spent three years helping to build turned into instruments pointed at the man who had raised me.
I had given Bryce the startup money, introduced him to my father's clients, signed documents, smoothed over every moment when his ambition outpaced his judgment.
I had called it love. I had kept calling it love even when the evidence stopped supporting it.
The grief was still there, but something harder had formed underneath it — specific and cold, pointed directly at him. Not at myself for trusting him. At him, for what he had actually done.
I looked at the room around me — my father on the floor, the documents, Bryce's unmoved expression — and I said it out loud.
"I refuse to disappear like this. If I get one more chance — one — I will take back every resource I gave him, I will protect my father, and I will make sure Bryce answers for what he did to me."
The conference room cracked apart. The documents dissolved. My father's still form, the scattered papers, the window facing the river — all of it fractured like a surface struck from underneath, and then there was nothing left of it at all.
