The door slid open. Lana shuffled out of the bathroom and stumbled toward her daughter. Beth flung her arms wide, and Lana fell into them. Jack came over and wrapped herself in from the side. For a long minute never to be spoken of again, the three women hugged.
They resettled around Lana’s bed, Lana propped up against a stack of crinkly pillows, Jack curled on the mattress around her feet, Beth on a plastic visitor’s chair.
“Is one of those for me?” Lana asked, eyeing the Styrofoam cups of coffee.
Beth handed her a bottle of water, twisting the cap half-open. “How are you feeling?”
“I’d be better with coffee.”
“Let’s take it slow, Ma. You’ve been out for almost two days.”
“Not quite. I woke up late last night with a terrible crick in my neck. I would have called you, but I couldn’t find my phone.”
“I have it. And your tote bag.”
Lana took a long sip of the water. “Did my wig make it?”
“I don’t think so. I have your suit, but it’s in pieces. The ICU nurses had to cut it off you because of all the glass embedded in the back. How are you feeling?”
“Sore. But I’ll survive. The doctor came by this morning. He said he expects I’ll make a full recovery.” Lana’s voice was rough, as if she’d swallowed a lump of charcoal.
Jack squeezed Lana’s hand.
“You were so brave, Prima.”
“Not really, Jack. I just don’t want to miss your high school graduation.”
“Don’t start getting modest now,” Beth said. “I talked with the firefighter, Chase Tucker, who brought you in. He said you practically leaped out of a burning building and kept going. He said if he hadn’t run into you, you would have crawled all the way here yourself.”
“Mmm. Chase. I had a dream about his . . . suspenders.” Lana looked over at the bedside table. “Are the flowers from him?”
Beth handed Lana the card.
Lana read it, looked at the bouquet, and jammed the card back into its envelope, her mouth set in a tight line.
“Victor. Hmpf. He probably set the damn fire,” she said.
“The man who runs the land trust? Why would he do that?”
Lana glared at a calla lily. “Maybe he wanted to scare me off. I think he was involved in Ricardo’s murder.”
Jack rested her hand on her grandmother’s ankle. “What did you find?”
“Victor and Ricardo were doing a brisk business in that little do-gooder office. Lots of contracts, lots of money. The fire started right when I was getting to the good stuff.”
Beth shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll be able to go back anytime soon. The rear of the building is apparently a crater, and the rest of it’s covered in water and soot. You got out of there just in time.”
“It was arson, right?”
Beth rubbed at the dark circles under her eyes. “I don’t know, Ma. But Detective Ramirez came by. Apparently the Santa Cruz police towed your car. Evidence, the detective said. She wants to meet with you.”
“Now she’s willing to talk to me.” Lana’s smile broke into a hacking cough.
Beth handed her mother the bottle of water. “We can call her when we get home.”
“Once I get my list of questions together.”
“Sure, Ma.”
Lana put down the water bottle and motioned with her chin to the Styrofoam coffee cups. “You aren’t going to tell me this is a stupid endeavor? Trying to crack the case? Chasing down a murderer?”
“No. I’m not.” Beth passed Lana a cup of coffee. “I can see this is important to you—”
“It is.”
“Can you tell me why?”
Lana sniffed the coffee before taking a sip. It smelled of stale almonds, like the kitchen in her first house in Los Angeles, the one Ari bought for them. She saw her twenty-six-year-old self there, bustling and humming to herself as she arranged new knives in the new butcher block. She’d quit law school to have the baby, but life was good, Beth was manageable, and Ari was passionate as ever. She hadn’t listened when her brother suggested it was dangerous, marrying a divorce lawyer. She loved Ari’s heat, the way he charged through life, fighting everyone—waiters, cab drivers, opposing counsel—to get exactly what he wanted. Their love language was war, and they were champion arguers, both of them, throwing barbs so sharp they sometimes paused midstream to appreciate each other’s virtuosity.
And then, one Saturday, while Beth was down for a nap, Ari bombed their battlefield. Lana stood there in that bright housewife’s kitchen, surrounded by new appliances, as Ari calmly announced that the life they’d built, the family Lana was building for them, no longer suited him. When she tried to argue, he brushed her aside. He looked at Lana like she was a soft, embarrassing wound. And then he walked away.
She had never forgotten that moment, the way it rendered her both disposable and desperate, a stock whose value had plummeted to zero. She ran from it as fast as she could, remedied first with wine and tears, then, more successfully, with work. She would never put herself in a position to be at someone else’s mercy again. She would provide for Beth and protect herself. It wasn’t about status or vanity. It was about survival.
Lana scrapped her way into real estate and kept building skyward, gladly sacrificing her softest parts to make herself hard, building a reputation as someone who never trusted but always delivered. Every deal cemented her safety. Every fallen adversary buttressed her strength. She kept herself impeccably tailored and toned, relentless in battle against the forces that turned other women invisible as they aged, stepped on and stepped over.
But now cancer was tearing down the iron defenses she’d built. She could see her impending irrelevance reflected in the faces of arrogant oncologists and overworked nurses. Even her daughter. People who thought they could shove her into a smaller life and expect her to be grateful for it. The only times she didn’t feel threatened these days were when she was working on the investigation, when she was asking questions instead of answering them.
Lana fingered the hospital bracelet around her wrist, the plasticky edges sharp against her skin. Heat swirled in her body. Agitation. Fear, even, fear of being prone, in a hospital bed, stranded there forever.
Of course, Lana didn’t say any of that.
“I . . . I just want to help.”
“Uh-huh.”
She tried again. “This matters to me. Doing something, working, it matters. I want to help.”
Lana looked up at Beth. She knew her words sounded hollow, but she hoped that behind them, Beth could hear her trying. To say something honest. To show her something real.
Beth gazed back at her and swallowed. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Okay. Then I want to help too.”
“You? Miss don’t-touch-that-magnifying-glass?” The words were out of Lana’s mouth before she had a chance to reconsider them.
But Beth didn’t take the bait. “I might not get it,” she said. “I might not love it. But if it’s important to you, it’s important to me. I’m not going to throw someone out for doing something I don’t understand.”
Lana flinched, turning her head to see if Jack was listening. The girl was following every word.
“If tracking down murderers is what you want to do, I’m not going to stop you,” Beth said. “And frankly, I don’t imagine anyone else could either.”
Beth held her hand out to her mother. Lana placed the empty Styrofoam cup back in her daughter’s hand, gently brushing her fingers as she did so.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lana said. “If we’re going to make progress, we need decent coffee.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
After getting cleared by the hospital with a stern directive to rest, change her bandages daily, and return if she had trouble breathing, Lana and her girls went home. She slept most of the weekend, rousing only to return Detective Ramirez’s call and request a meeting as soon as possible to discuss the fire.
Early Monday morning, she woke to hear Beth on the phone in the kitchen, wavering over a request to cover another nurse’s shift at Bayshore Oaks. Lana pulled herself up to standing and shuffled out of the back bedroom, ignoring the flickering pain that accompanied the movement.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go to work. Go to school. I can take care of myself.”