Nina Baird on the Record

Nico manages one clean win before midnight. Using the exhumation match, staff records, and family confirmation from Nina's estranged brother in Knoxville, he gets the official death amendment filed. The record now reads what it should have six years ago: Nina Baird, not Tessa Mercer Hart.

He brings the printed amendment to me in the surveillance van like a priest carrying a small sacrament. I hold the paper with both hands and feel relief arrive in a strange shape, thinner than justice and heavier than grief. A name returned is not a resurrection. It is still a beginning.

Tessa reads it over my shoulder and says nothing for a long time. Then, quietly, "She would have hated the flower arrangement on my grave."

I laugh, and the sound breaks into something uglier halfway through. "She probably hated half this town."

"That was one of her better qualities."

Outside, the museum gala is finally emptying. Donor cars slide away through the rain. Inside the van, the official paper makes everything both cleaner and more prosecutable. Nina is no longer a tragic abstraction or a swapped corpse in a strategy memo. She is on the record. That means the wrongfulness can start billing full price.

My phone buzzes with a call from a Knoxville number I don't know. Nina's brother, Darren, voice already wrecked. "They say you finally fixed the certificate," he says. "Then I'm suing every one of you who made my sister disappear."

"You should," I answer.

He is quiet, surprised perhaps that I did not reach for absolution. "Good," he says. "I already hired counsel."

The call ends. Nico exhales slowly. "Wrongful death just became a lot easier."

Tessa taps the amendment with one finger. "Good. Let it eat."