Chapter 3 - THE TRAWLER
Two hundred miles from the wedding island, in a small coastal clinic that smelled of antiseptic and salt air, a woman with no identification and a shattered collarbone opened her eyes for the first time in nine days.
The fishing captain who found her — a broad, weathered man named Costa — had assumed at first that she was dead. She had struck the water at an angle just shallow enough, in a spot the current had kept unusually calm, and his nets had done what nets are built to do: catch things before they sink.
"You're safe," the nurse told her, when her eyes finally focused. "Do you know your name?"
It took Veronika four days to answer that question, and when she did, she asked the nurse not to write it down.
She had understood, somewhere in the fog of concussion and salt water, exactly what had happened on that helicopter, and exactly why. She remembered his hands. She remembered his smile with no warmth in it. And she understood, with a clarity that frightened even her, that the moment the world learned she was alive, she would need to already know who had planned to kill her — and why he had been so certain no one would ever ask.
May you like
She asked Costa, in a voice still raw from the ocean, to make one phone call for her. Not to the police. Not to her company. To a woman whose number she had memorized decades ago and never once needed until now.
Ingrid Wexler answered on the second ring.
