Page 122 of Unlocked

"You look pale," Bunny said.

"I'm always pale," Tatum rasped.

"You look paler than usual." Bunny crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. "You should be resting."

"I am resting." Tatum gestured at the couch she was sitting on, the files spread across the cushion beside her, the legal pad balanced on her knee. "This is me resting."

"That," Bunny said, with a precision that had not diminished one degree since Tatum had woken up in a hospital bed six weeks ago with her mother sitting beside her looking composed and slightly inconvenienced, "is not resting. That is working. They are different things."

"The Anderson case isn't going to work itself."

Bunny's expression didn't change. "The Anderson case is not your concern."

"It is, actually." Tatum made a note on the legal pad. "The woman who filed the original suit is looking for others. She's building toward a class action. That changes the strategy considerably, and someone needs to be across it."

"Someone else can be across it."

"I know it best." It still struck Tatum as odd that her mother cared at all. Usually, Bunny would be telling her to work harder. Even Stuart had backed off. It made her nervous.

"Tatum." Bunny's voice carried the particular tone it held when she had decided a conversation was over. "You were in a coma for three weeks. You have only been out of the hospital for six. You went back to the office two weeks ago against medical advice—against my advice—and you are doing too much."

Tatum rubbed the back of her head. The scar was still tender in a way that caught her off guard sometimes, a sudden, sharp reminder of a parking garage floor that she had told everyone she couldn't remember.

"Headache?" Bunny asked. Her eyes had sharpened.

"It's starting to build a little," Tatum said. "I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You need to stop for the day."

Tatum glanced at the window. The light was going. Past five, probably closer to six. Her mother could have told her to stop earlier but she hadn’t. The new Bunny was caring but only so much. She kept that thought to herself.

"Perhaps you're right," she said.

Bunny looked faintly suspicious at the capitulation but accepted it with the grace of someone accustomed to getting what she wanted. She uncrossed her legs and stood, smoothing her coat, the ritual preparations for departure that Tatum had watched her whole life.

"I'll call tomorrow morning," Bunny said. "Before the meeting."

"Of course," Tatum said.

Bunny paused at the door. She looked at Tatum for a moment with the expression that Tatum had never been able to fully read, not love exactly, not the kind of love that looked like other people's love, but something that might have been its closest available approximation in a woman who had decided a long time ago that sentiment was a luxury she couldn't afford.

"Get some sleep," Bunny said.

"Goodnight, Mother," Tatum said.

The door closed.

Tatum sat on the couch for a full two minutes without moving. She counted them. An old habit, learned from a lifetime of bracing for the worst, the discipline of waiting long enough to be sure.

Then she set the legal pad on the coffee table, gathered the files, and walked into her closet.

She pressed the panel, stepped into her secret room, then closed the door behind her. A sense of the familiar and eagerness filled her as she stood in the quiet of the smallish space. The research wall was different now. Rebuilt from scratch in the weeks since she'd come home, using the copies Ryker had given her and everything she'd reconstructed from memory, which turned out to be considerable. The amnesia had been real for the first week. Fragments and fog and a blinding headache that made thinking feel like trying to see through frosted glass.

Then it had all come back.

The folder on her mother's desk. Thistledew. The garage. Josh's face above her, the particular expression on it in the last moment before she hit the ground. The cold concrete against the back of her head.

Archer's voice calling her name.