“Mine.” “How old?” “Four months.”
Gregory was quiet for a long moment, then he spoke. “I can’t go to a hospital. I can’t make calls. I can’t let anyone know I’m alive. Do you understand?” Marina sat across from him and looked him in the eye.
“I’m a former inmate,” she said evenly. “Did five years on a manslaughter charge. There’s plenty I can’t do either. So I get it.” He didn’t look away. He nodded.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Just not yet.” He told her three days later. Not all at once. In pieces.
Marina didn’t push. First he told her about the meat processing company. “Tarasevich & Son.” Three facilities. Two hundred employees.
Gregory had built it from scratch back in the nineties, when he was still butchering meat himself and hauling deliveries in an old truck to local markets. It grew into a regional supplier serving five states. Then he started talking about his son.
Adam, thirty, his only heir. Gregory spoke about him in clipped sentences. “I raised him alone. His mother left when he was three.”
“I thought if I gave him everything, he’d understand. Education. A condo. A car. A management job in the company. He didn’t.”
“What do you mean, he didn’t?” Marina asked. “I mean it was never enough. It was never enough for him.”
Gregory fell silent and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Last year I got sick. Diabetes. Heart trouble. Blood pressure.”
“My doctor said I needed surgery. Adam found a clinic. Good one, private. I went in, they put me under.”
“I woke up in a coffin.” Marina listened without interrupting. “The doctor signed the death certificate.”
“Acute heart failure during surgery. Adam paid him. How much, I don’t know, but enough. He arranged the funeral fast. Less than a day. Closed casket. Nobody saw the body. I don’t have many close friends, and the ones I do have wouldn’t have thought to question it.”
“How did you…”
