Chapter 48 Echoes and Emergencies
Lila's POV - Medical Facility - Day 5
I couldn't sleep.
Clara's revelation kept spinning through my mind like a record stuck on repeat. Stirling-Hale had declared me dead. They'd been watching me for three years. Everything the job at Cole Enterprises, meeting Ethan, maybe even the text message could have been orchestrated from the beginning.
But to what end?
At 3 AM, I gave up on sleep and moved to the window. The private garden below was illuminated by soft security lights, peaceful and serene. A gilded prison with a pretty view.
My hand moved to my stomach. Still flat, but I'd started feeling different. Not morning sickness not yet but a kind of awareness. A presence that wasn't just me anymore.
"What am I supposed to tell you?" I whispered to the baby. "That your mother doesn't know who she is? That your father is in a coma in Switzerland, and his parents think I might be a con artist? That you were conceived in a hotel room between two people who barely knew each other?"
The baby, of course, didn't answer.
But it didn't need to. Because I knew what I had to tell this child eventually: the truth. All of it. The good, the bad, the complicated mess of two identities colliding.
If I survived long enough to have that conversation.
My phone buzzed. A text from Marcus: You awake?
Me: Can't sleep.
Marcus: Security room. Five minutes. Bring your questions.
The security room was on the same floor, at the end of the hall. The guard outside my door a different one than yesterday, a woman named Agent Torres nodded as I passed.
"Mr. Wells is expecting you," she said.
Inside, Marcus sat in front of a wall of monitors showing various angles of the facility. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept much either.
"Sit," he said, gesturing to the chair beside him. "We need to talk."
"About what?"
"About the fact that you're not the only one asking questions," Marcus said. He pulled up a file on one of the screens. "After Clara's discovery about the death certificate, I did some digging of my own. And I found something that changes things."
"What?"
"The man who signed your death certificate Dr. Richard Vance didn't just work for Stirling-Hale," Marcus said. "He was also briefly employed by Cole Enterprises. Seven years ago. He worked in our medical research division for eighteen months before being terminated for ethics violations."
My blood ran cold. "What kind of ethics violations?"
"Unauthorized experiments involving memory suppression therapy," Marcus said. "He was trying to develop a treatment for PTSD using experimental drugs and psychological conditioning. The FDA shut him down, Cole Enterprises fired him, and he disappeared from legitimate medical practice."
"Until Stirling-Hale hired him," I finished.
"Exactly," Marcus said. "Which means there's a connection between Cole Enterprises, Stirling-Hale, and whatever happened to you three years ago. And I think—" He paused, choosing his words carefully. "I think Adrian might have known about it."
I stared at him. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that six months ago, right around the time you applied to Cole Enterprises, Adrian started a private investigation into Stirling-Hale. Not the official one that James and Eleanor knew about a separate, personal investigation. He was looking into something specific. Something he didn't want his parents to know about."
"How do you know this?"
"Because he asked me to help him," Marcus said quietly. "He showed me a file heavily redacted, mostly blacked out. But there was one name visible in the documents."
He turned the monitor toward me. On the screen was a scanned document, most of it obscured by black bars. But in the middle, highlighted in yellow, was a single name:
Project Tabula Rasa - Subject: S. Chen
"Tabula rasa," I whispered. "Latin for 'blank slate.'"
"Adrian was investigating a project that used your name," Marcus said. "A project connected to Dr. Vance and Stirling-Hale. He never told me what he found, but three weeks later, he started watching you at the office. Not romantically professionally. Like he was trying to figure something out."
My hands trembled. "He knew who I was. Before the text message. Before everything."
"I think so," Marcus said. "Or at least, he suspected. And I think that's why he responded to your text the way he did. Why he invited you to dinner. Why he was in that car with you the night of the crash."
"He was investigating me," I said numbly.
"Or protecting you," Marcus countered. "We don't know which. But Lila if Adrian was looking into Project Tabula Rasa, and then Stirling-Hale orchestrated that crash, it means they knew he was getting too close to something they wanted buried."
"Me," I said. "I'm what they want buried."
Marcus nodded grimly. "The question is why. What do you know that's worth killing for?"
"I don't know!" I stood up, pacing. "I can't remember! Sophia's memories are fragments, and Lila's memories might not even be real, and I don't know what's true anymore!"
"Then we need to help you remember," Marcus said. "Dr. Morrison's therapy is a start, but it's not enough. We need to find the man who helped you three years ago. The one from your recovered memory. If we can identify him, we can find out what Project Tabula Rasa really was."
"And how do we do that?"
Marcus pulled up another file. "We start with the hospital in Boston. Someone paid your bills. Someone checked you out. There's a paper trail somewhere, and I'm going to find it."
"The Coles know about this?" I asked.
"Not yet," Marcus admitted. "I wanted to verify some facts before bringing it to them. But Lila if I'm right, this changes everything. You're not a con artist who got unlucky. You're a witness to something big enough that Stirling-Hale is willing to commit murder to keep it quiet."
"A witness to what?"
"That," Marcus said, "is what we're going to find out."