Chapter 8
Bell’s confession hung in the room after he stopped speaking. Margaret stood motionless beside the table, one hand resting on the folder as if the paper might blow away.
My phone vibrated. Beth’s name flashed across the screen.
“There’s a reporter outside,” she said when I answered. Her voice was low, but I heard Emma singing somewhere behind her. “He asked if she was here. He knows my address.”
I closed my eyes for one beat. “Don’t open the door. Don’t answer any questions. Can you take Emma to Nina’s?”
Beth’s friend Nina lived across town, far from the Whitmores’ polished orbit. Beth had once told me Nina kept spare pajamas for visiting children in a drawer and never asked for explanations before putting on the kettle.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell Emma we’re having an adventure.”
“Keep it ordinary. She doesn’t need another reason to be scared.”
When I hung up, Margaret was already gathering the copies. Bell watched us, his face pinched with the knowledge that telling the truth had not made him brave enough to feel safe.
“Don’t go back to the house,” he said.
“I’m not.”
I drove toward Beth’s with Margaret beside me. We didn’t take the route Emma knew, and when we arrived, the reporter’s car was still at the curb. Beth had already bundled Emma into her coat. Her little rabbit’s ears poked from the top of her backpack.
Emma saw me and hurried over.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Yes, sweetheart. A different place for tonight.”
“Can Rabbit come?”
“Rabbit is essential.”
She clutched the backpack against her chest. I kissed the crown of her head, inhaling the smell of her shampoo and the faint sweetness of the cookie Beth had given her. For one sharp second, I pictured Victoria’s hand offering Emma a cookie in our kitchen, the secret wrapped in something meant to feel kind.
Then I let Emma go with Beth. I didn’t tell her to be brave. She was four. She deserved to be carried through this, not assigned a job inside it.
Trevor called as I was watching their car pull away.
“Claire, I found something in the company access trail,” he said. He sounded as if he were standing somewhere hard and echoing. “The address the reporter has came from a family security file. The account that opened it was SVOSS.”
I looked down the street. The reporter had stepped out of his car and was studying the front of Beth’s house.
“Silas Voss?”
“That’s the ID tied to his credentials. It doesn’t show who handed the address to the reporter, but Voss accessed the file shortly before the reporter contacted Beth.”
A faint scrape came through the phone, then Trevor swore under his breath.
“What happened?”
“I’m making a copy of the access log now. They can lock me out, but they can’t make me forget what I saw.”
“Where are you?”
“Parking lot behind the old library. Can you meet me there?”
I glanced at the reporter. He had turned toward me.
“I’ll come alone.”
At the library, Trevor waited beside his car with a folded printout in his hand. I stayed several feet away. The last time I’d trusted him near a family crisis, he had held me still while his mother threatened me in front of our sons’ coffins.
He noticed the distance. He didn’t ask me to close it.
He handed me the paper. The company file name was familiar from the security records Margaret had shown me; below it was the access code and the time it had been opened. The timing matched the reporter’s appearance at Beth’s.
“He had no reason to look at that file,” Trevor said. “I’m almost certain this came from Voss.”
“Almost certain isn’t proof.”
“I know.” He swallowed. “But it’s enough to get Emma out of there.”
A message arrived on his phone. He read it, and his mouth tightened before he passed it to me.
Victoria’s words were brief, polished, and unmistakably hers.
I can make arrangements for you to see Emma. Tell Claire to stop digging, and we can put this family back together.
Not I miss my granddaughter. Not Is she safe? An offer, with a condition.
Trevor took the phone back. His thumb hovered over the call button. Then he pressed it.
“You don’t get to bargain with Emma,” he said when his mother answered. “And I will not ask Claire to stop.”
There was a pause. I couldn’t hear Victoria’s reply, only a faint, controlled murmur.
“No, Mom. I heard you.”
He ended the call. His hand shook once before he shoved the phone into his coat pocket.
I believed he had refused her. I did not mistake that for becoming someone I could trust.
“I’m glad you told me about the leak,” I said. “That’s what I can give you.”
He nodded, accepting the limit without trying to turn it into forgiveness.
Then his phone chimed again. He frowned at the screen.
“My company account’s been disabled.”
“Already?”
“Email, internal files, everything.” He tried another login. The screen rejected him. “They’ve shut the door.”
“Maybe that’s all they’ve done.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “I’m going home.”
“Don’t go inside if anything feels wrong.”
“I won’t.”
But he did go inside. A little after nine, he called me again. His voice had changed—not louder, but stripped down to something raw.
“Someone’s been here.”
I stood in the temporary kitchen where Beth’s friend Nina had left tea bags and a plate of untouched cookies. Beyond the doorway, Emma was asleep on the couch, one hand curled around Rabbit.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. They went through the desk, the bedroom, the file cabinet. They didn’t take the laptop or the watch.” He stopped speaking. I heard a door creak in the background. “Claire, there’s an empty space on the wall.”
“What was there?”
“A picture from when I was a kid. Me on my father’s shoulders at the lake.” His breath caught. “My mother took that picture. She gave me the frame years ago.”
I pressed my free hand to the counter. “Don’t touch anything else.”
“I know.”
For several seconds, neither of us spoke. Somewhere behind me, Emma shifted in her sleep, then settled again.
“My account is locked, my house has been searched, and now that picture is gone,” Trevor said. “What does she want from me?”
Before I could answer, a notification sounded on his end.
He went quiet.
“Trevor?”
“There’s a message from an unknown number.”
“What does it say?”
May you like
His voice dropped.
“Come alone.”
