Chapter 2 - Ten Feet Down
Reaching him took less than four seconds, and it felt like the longest stretch of her life.
Emily went off the stone without deciding anything. Her shoes came off somewhere in the air, and the water closed over her head, and the cold went through the bones of her face so fast that for a moment she couldn't tell up from down.
The shock of it was violent, stealing the air right out of her lungs. But survival instinct, honed by years of looking after her younger brother through every emergency room crisis, took over. She kicked hard, orienting herself by the pale shafts of sunlight piercing the artificial pond.
He was at the bottom. Ten feet down.
The chair had settled upright on the tile as though someone had parked it there on purpose—four wheels, two footplates, a man in it, sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool like an appointment nobody had kept.
She got both hands under his arms and pulled.
Nothing.
Her muscles strained against the dead weight of the paralyzed man combined with the crushing heft of the custom motorized chair. She pulled again, driving up off the tile with both legs, and he didn't move an inch. In the wavering blue light coming sideways through the surface, she saw why.
The tail of his custom wool suit jacket had gone through the gap between the seat frame and the rear axle, wrapping once around the titanium drive bar. The full weight of the chair and the submerged electronics had cinched the fabric tight, creating an unbreakable mechanical anchor. It was the kind of thing that would have taken somebody ten seconds to untangle on dry land with tools.
She had maybe thirty seconds of breath left. Her chest began to burn, a hot, prickling sensation creeping up her throat.
She could have gone up. That was the thing she came back to, afterward, in the dark, for a long time. She could have surfaced, taken a full breath, shouted for help, come back down with a plan, a knife, a team of men. And by then he would have been past the point where coming back down mattered.
So she stayed.
She put her palm flat on his chest to hold herself steady against the buoyant water and started on the buttons of his jacket.
The first one came loose easily. The second didn't, because her fingers had already gone clumsy with cold and with fear, and she had to work it through the buttonhole twice before the wet fabric let it go.
He was watching her the whole time.
That was the part she would carry. Not the water, not the burning in her lungs, not the terror of the deep. The fact that a man that far down still had his eyes wide open, staring straight through the murky green water. His gaze was fixed entirely on her hands, and his face looked as calm as a man sitting in a parking lot watching somebody else reverse into a space.
He didn't thrash. He didn't grab at her wrists in panic. He held perfectly still so that her frantic fingers could work, and that absolute stillness told her more about who he was than anything anyone had said about him in the nine days she'd been in that house.
The third button gave way with a faint pop.
She shoved her hand inside the collar, driving her forearm against his chest and shoving the heavy wool back off one shoulder and then the other. The sodden garment slipped free, catching briefly on the armrest before floating away into the gloom like a sinking shadow.
Freed from the anchor, he came up off the tile so suddenly that she almost lost her grip on him.
Her shoulder broke the surface first, gasping in air that tasted like heaven. She hooked her chin above the waterline, sliding her forearm under his jaw—the exact lifesaving hold someone had taught her at the town pool in Cranston a lifetime ago—and began to kick toward the shallow stone steps on the far side. The main ladder was too steep; she needed the gradual slope.
Nobody helped her until she was already there.
Then hands came down—several pairs at once, men in expensive linen jackets suddenly very busy—and she was lifted and moved aside so efficiently that she found herself sitting on the flagstone in a spreading puddle of lake water without quite remembering how she'd gotten out.
There was no applause.
That was what struck her most. Two hundred people on that lawn, and not one of them made a sound. No shout of triumph. No rush of collective voices. Nothing but the shuffle of expensive shoes on stone, and somewhere behind her, a woman setting a crystal glass down on a silver tray with absolute, terrifying precision.
The band had stopped. Somebody had thought to stop the band.
May you like
Emily sat with water running in thick streams out of her hair and down her collar, shivering violently, and watched them work on him. And she understood in a slow, cold way that had nothing to do with the pool: these people were not shocked.
They were waiting to see what came next.
