They Faked Their Deaths, I Faked My Recovery Chapter 07
Sloane set her phone down and let herself picture it.
The banquet. Graham beside her, the kids, her parents, all watching as she received the Medal of Valor. It would be perfect.
And Mara? Mara was dead.
Graham and her parents would grieve for a while. But grief fades.
Give it a month, and no one would even remember her.
Mara couldn’t beat her when she was alive. She sure as hell wasn’t going to beat her now.
At least she’d been useful for something in the end. A Medal of Valor, hand-delivered.
The door opened. A server wheeled in a massive sheet cake almost the size of a table.
Department brass and colleagues filed in behind him, all smiles.
Then Mara’s parents walked in with Wesley between them, and Graham followed, his daughter on his hip. The whole family, together.
Sloane smiled. She couldn’t help it.
She’d known they wouldn’t miss this.
She’d won again.
The room applauded. Chief Calder stepped forward with the Medal of Valor in hand and reached to pin it on Sloane.
—
His fingers had just found the clasp when Graham stood up.
“There’s something everyone in this room needs to hear.”
“Three years ago, Sloane didn’t fake her death to go undercover. She didn’t infiltrate anything.”
“She faked it because she was pregnant with my child and didn’t want people to talk. She’s been living in comfort this entire time, hidden, taken care of, safe.”
“Mara risked her life for that evidence. Sloane took it and claimed it as her own.”
Mara’s mother grabbed the medal out of Chief Calder’s hands. She was crying before she even started talking.
“I’ll swear to it! Sloane’s been living in a house in a gated community in the Briarhaven suburbs. She had a housekeeper, a personal driver, anything she wanted. She never went undercover. She never set foot near a criminal syndicate. She doesn’t have a single scratch on her!”
“My daughter Mara collected every piece of that evidence. After they took her off Major Crimes, she had no gun, no backup, nothing. She went in alone and she almost died, more than once…”
She couldn’t finish. The crying swallowed the rest of her words.
If Mara hadn’t posted those photos before she died, her mother never would’ve known what she’d been through.
She’d always assumed the work came easy to Mara. That you arrested someone, asked the right questions, and the evidence just fell into place.
—
If she’d known what it cost Mara to get that evidence, she never would’ve asked her to hand Sloane the credit.
Graham’s hands were shaking as he plugged a flash drive into the projector’s laptop.
The screen lit up, and every head in the room turned.