“Get up, Merritt. It was a joke!” My sister laughed above the marble staircase while I lay below, my surgical brace twisted sideways, my foot numb. Mom told guests to stop staring. Dad asked whether the photographer had captured my fall. The quartet stopped playing. Then my sister’s fiancé turned toward her, disgust written across his face. He finally spoke….

“The wedding,” Arthur said softly, “is scheduled for eleven o’clock this morning. At nine o’clock, Merritt is expected to appear and offer a groveling apology to Sloan for having the audacity to bleed on her rehearsal floor.”

Arthur stood up, buttoning his suit jacket.

“I believe we should give them exactly what they asked for. An appearance.”

He turned to Greer. “Did you secure the transport?”

“A wheelchair-accessible medical van is parked downstairs,” Greer replied. “And I brought Merritt’s wardrobe.”

Greer reached into a garment bag she had hung behind the door.

She did not pull out the blush-pink silk bridesmaid dress with its torn hem and bloodstains around the skirt.

She pulled out a crisp, tailored black wool trouser suit from my home closet, a starch-collared white silk blouse, and my heavy, professional-grade carbon-fiber orthopedic brace—the one fitted with titanium hinges and dual-locking stabilization bars, designed for climbing industrial freight docks.

“You’re not going back there as an apologetic bridesmaid, Merritt,” Greer said, laying the suit across the bed. “You are going back as the lead claims investigator for North Atlantic Marine Underwriters. You are going to inspect the wreckage.”

A nurse arrived twenty minutes later with discharge papers, a set of crutches, and a motorized, high-back transport wheelchair equipped with an elevating leg rest.

Getting into my clothes was an ordeal of calculated agony. Every slide of fabric over my swollen, purple-stitched knee sent cold sweat running down my temples. Greer helped me thread my left leg into the trousers, while the right trouser leg was unzipped along the side seam to accommodate the heavy titanium brace that now locked my limb straight from mid-thigh to ankle.

When I looked in the small mirror above the hospital sink, I barely recognized the frightened woman who had tumbled down the stairs fourteen hours ago.

My hair was pulled back into a severe, polished chignon. My face was pale, the dark circles beneath my eyes masked by the foundation Greer had brought from my apartment, but my eyes were clear. The tears were gone. In their place was the cold, analytical focus I used when a shipping company claimed an oil tanker had run aground due to “an act of God,” and I had to prove their captain was drunk at the helm.

At 8:15 a.m., Greer pushed my wheelchair through the sliding glass doors of Newport Memorial Hospital into the crisp ocean air.

Arthur was waiting by the black transport van, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“Understood, Detective,” Arthur was saying into the receiver. “We will be on-site within twenty minutes. Have your unit staged near the secondary service gate. Do not engage until I give you the signal. We want all parties present and identified.”

He hung up, opened the rear ramp of the van, and guided my chair up into the locking harness.

“Who was that?” I asked as Greer climbed into the passenger seat.

Arthur took his seat beside me, adjusting his legal folders.

“That was Detective Lieutenant Thomas Carver, Newport Police Department,” Arthur said smoothly. “He happens to be an old friend of mine. And he was very, very interested to see Bellamy’s video.”