He had not slept in nineteen hours and he did not care.
Sleep was for people who had nothing pressing sitting on their chest. Lucas had something that had not moved since the hospital room — something that had started as shock and had travelled through devastation and had arrived, over nineteen hours of airports and planes and foreign city ceilings, at something much simpler and much colder.
Rage.
Clean and total and entirely focused.
He knew what he was going to do. He had known since the cemetery. Since he had stood in front of his grandmother's headstone in the grey morning and said the words out loud for the first time — "Sarah is gone. My child is gone"… and felt the full weight of them land in his body and convert immediately into the only thing that felt like a response to that weight.
Someone was going to pay for it.
The cemetery had been quiet.
He had walked the path to Rosaria's grave without looking at anything else — the other headstones, the morning light through the trees, the bird making noise somewhere in the distance. He had no attention for any of it. He walked directly to where she was and he stood in front of her name carved into stone and he said nothing for a long time.
Then he crouched down.
Put his hand on the stone.
"Sarah is dead," he said. "My child is dead."
He let that sit in the air between him and the stone.
"There is a woman in my house who put them on that road. She has been living in my house under my wife's name eating my food sleeping in my wife's bed walking through my wife's rooms as if she has any right to any of it."
His hand pressed harder against the stone.
"She is alive," he said. "She is alive and Sarah is not and I am going to make sure she understands what that costs."
He stood up.
He looked at his grandmother's name one last time.
He took out his phone.
He made the call.
The police cars were waiting at the gate when his car pulled up.
Six officers. He had been specific about the number. He had been specific about everything — the charges, the timing, the manner of it. Fraud. Unlawful assumption of identity. Responsibility for the death of Sarah Venzagrase and her unborn child. He had delivered all of it in the flat precise tone he used when something was already decided and he was simply communicating the decision to the relevant parties.
He walked through the gates.
He walked through the front door.
The household was assembled in the entrance hall the way households assemble when multiple police vehicles arrive at the gate — the particular frozen quality of people who understand something significant is happening and are waiting to find out what it means for them specifically. His mother. Reema. Caden. Johny. Rio. Various relatives. Staff at careful distances.
Lucas looked at none of them.
"Bring her down," he said.
She came down the stairs the way she did everything.
Quietly. Carefully. Watching him the whole way down with those eyes that had been watching him since the night he pulled her from that wreckage — reading him, cataloguing him, doing the thing she did where she took everything in and gave nothing back.
He watched her come down the stairs and he felt nothing tender about it.
She was alive.
She was standing in his house breathing his air wearing his wife's face and she was alive and Sarah was in the ground and he was done pretending that proximity to her grief was something he was willing to tolerate.
She reached the bottom of the stairs.
She stood three feet from him.
He looked at her face and felt his jaw tighten.
That face.
Sarah's face. Every line of it. Every feature exactly as it had been the day he carried her out of that hospital. Looking at Elena was looking at Sarah and looking at Sarah was looking at the woman whose death he was still learning how to carry and he was so tired of carrying it in a house where the person responsible was sleeping down the hall.
"That's her," he said to the officers.
She reached for her notebook.
Of course she did. It was the only weapon she had and she reached for it immediately — writing fast, the handwriting uneven, holding it up toward the officers with shaking hands.
Lucas did not look at the notebook.
She turned it toward him. Held it directly in his eyeline.
He looked past it.
She grabbed his arm.
He looked down at her hands on his sleeve and felt something that was not sympathy and was not softness and was not any version of the thing he had felt when he held her on a hospital floor. That had been a moment of weakness. He was done with moments of weakness.
He removed her hands.
Not gently.
He simply removed them and stepped back and looked at the officers and nodded once.
"Lucas."
His mother stepped forward. He had expected this. His mother approached everything through the lens of consequence and reputation and he had already decided he did not care about either of those things today.
"Think about what you are doing. The press will be at those gates within the hour. Arresting a woman in your own home — the questions it raises, the attention it brings, the family name—"
"I have thought about it," Lucas said.
"The reputation—"
"I don't care," he said.
His mother looked at him.
"Lucas this is not—"
"I said I don't care," he said. Quietly. Finally. The specific quiet of a man who has closed a door and locked it. "Sarah is dead. My child is dead. That woman is responsible. I do not care about the reputation of this family today. I care about one thing and one thing only and it is standing right there."
He looked at Elena when he said the last part.
She looked back at him.
And he felt nothing.
Or rather he felt the specific cold satisfaction of a man who has decided that feeling nothing is exactly right.
Johny moved forward from the other side.
"Cousin. Consider the legal implications. If there are questions about identity — about what actually happened that night — arresting her creates a record that could—"
"Then it creates a record,"* Lucas said. *"I'm not asking for opinions. I'm not asking for counsel. I'm not asking anyone in this room for anything."
He looked at Johny steadily.
" Is that clear."
Johny held his gaze for one moment.
Then stepped back.
Caden said nothing.
He stood at the edge of the room and said absolutely nothing and Lucas noted this peripherally without caring. Caden could stand there looking stricken all he wanted. It changed nothing.
Reema said nothing either.
She stood with her arms crossed and her face arranged into something unreadable and she looked at Elena once and then looked away and stayed exactly where she was.
Good.
Lucas turned back to the officers.
"Get on with it," he said.
She tried everything.