Chapter 5 - The Needle and the Seal
The basement wasn't a basement. It was a clean, white room with three stainless-steel tables, two massive silver refrigerators that hummed like bees, and a row of digital screens that showed various charts of human blood cells.
A man with gray hair and a white coat—Dr. Vance—was already waiting for us. He didn't ask for my name. He didn't say he was sorry about my mother. He simply pointed to a black leather chair with two wide armrests that had small leather straps attached to the sides, though he didn't use them.
"Left arm, please," he said.
I sat down, my plastic bag resting against my shins. I pulled up the sleeve of my hoodie, revealing the white skin of my forearm—the small mole near the elbow that looked exactly like the one on my mother’s left wrist.
Julian stood by the door, his arms crossed over his chest. Christopher stayed in the hall, smoking a long, white cigarette even though there was a sign on the glass that said Oxygen—No Smoking. Adrian sat on the edge of one of the stainless-steel tables, his boots swinging back and forth, his thumb moving across his phone screen again.
The needle went in. It didn't hurt as much as the medicine they used to give my mother at the clinic, but the sound of the blood hitting the small glass tube—that low, hollow shhh-t—made my stomach turn over.
"One more," Dr. Vance said, swapping the tube for a second one with a purple top. "The estate office requires the maternal mitochondrial line verification for the third-tier probate clearance. It takes an extra forty minutes in the centrifuge."
"Just get it done, Vance," Julian said. He looked at his watch—a heavy gold piece with three small dials that didn't show the time, but the different time zones of Tokyo, London, and New York. "Arthur is waiting upstairs with the non-disclosure agreements. We need her signature before the morning edition of the Post goes to press."
"I'm not signing anything," I said.
The room went quiet again, except for the low hum of the refrigerators.
Dr. Vance pulled the needle out, pressing a small piece of white gauze against my skin with his thumb. He looked up at Julian, waiting for instructions.
"You're signing them, Autumn," Julian said without moving from the door. "It's fifty thousand dollars a month for the next ten years, paid through a shell LLC registered in Delaware. You go back to Ohio. You buy the house with the new roof. You go to the local college. You don't talk to the newspapers, and you don't use the name Song on your driver’s license."
I stood up, holding the gauze against my arm with my right hand. I didn't look at Julian; I looked at my bag.
"My mother told me to find my brothers," I said, my voice shaking so hard the words felt like they were coming out sideways. "She didn't tell me to find a hedge fund. She didn't tell me to find an actor. She thought... she thought you were her boys. She had a picture of you under her mattress, Julian. A small one from the beach in 1996. You were wearing a yellow bucket hat, and you had a plastic shovel in your hand."
Julian’s face didn't change, but his right hand—the one with the signet ring—clenched into a fist so hard the skin over his knuckles went white.
"The yellow hat belonged to Christopher," Adrian said from the table. He had stopped swinging his boots. His phone was sitting face down on the stainless steel. "Julian had the blue one with the sharks. He lost it in the surf the day before she left."
He stood up, walking over to me until he was close enough that I could see the tiny gold snake logo on his hoodie strings.
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"The non-disclosure agreement is standard, Autumn," he said, his voice dropping into something that sounded almost like an apology. "Julian does it with everybody. He did it with my mother's sister when she tried to come to the funeral five years ago. It’s just... it’s how we keep the house from falling down."
"The house is already down, Adrian," I said, picking up my red, white, and blue bag by its worn plastic handles. "You just have better rugs than we did."
