“That sounds like Deborah.”
Harlan shook his head.
“No.
She requested one particular model.”
I felt cold.
“What was different about it?”
He looked at me.
“It had a secondary interior release.”
I stopped breathing.
“What?”
“An emergency latch.”
“Inside?”
“Yes.”
Quade’s face hardened.
“Why would a coffin have that?”
“Some manufacturers experimented with safety designs years ago.
This one was old inventory.”
My heart began pounding.
“Who knew?”
“Your mother.”
Silence.
I remembered waking.
Moving one finger.
The lid slightly open.
The thin line of light.
The fact that I had never tried to search for a latch because my body barely functioned.
“Deborah chose a coffin I could escape from?”
Harlan nodded.
“She made me promise not to tell anyone.”
“Before Julian saw me blink?”
“Yes.”
Everything inside me stopped.
My mother had chosen that coffin
before the funeral began.
Before Julian exposed that I was alive.
Before she supposedly changed her mind.
“Why?”
I whispered.
Harlan looked sick.
“She said, ‘Just in case.’”
I sat down.
All this time, I had believed the final truth was that Deborah planned my death and then changed her mind when she saw me alive.
But she had known there was a chance I would wake.
She had built me an exit.
Not enough to guarantee survival.
But enough to create one.
Quade frowned.
“Then why the tracking device?
Why the pills?”
“Because she was still deciding,” I said.
I understood now.
My mother’s conspiracy had never been clean.
