Chapter 1 — From the Bottom of a Well

“Once they declare her incapacitated, liquidate everything.

Then we let her go.”

Adaira Redgrave heard her husband’s voice as though it were rising up from the bottom of a deep, dark well.

She could not open her eyes.

She could not move her fingers.

She could not make a single sound.

But every word arrived in her with a terrible clarity — a death sentence spoken beside her own hospital bed, in the calm, reasonable tone he used to close a deal.

Everyone at the hospital in Chicago believed she was gone.

Her body breathed with the help of machines, the charts said, but her mind had been dark since the crash on the icy highway outside Evanston.

The nurses spoke in low voices in her room.

The doctors chose soft, careful words so as not to frighten her son.

The reporters had stopped waiting in the lobby after the first week.

To the world, Adaira Redgrave — one of the most feared criminal defense attorneys in the city — was already, more or less, a memory.