Chapter 3: The Service Corridor Left One Question Unanswered
By the time the guests were moved from the ballroom, the cake no longer belonged to the birthday. It belonged to the evidence. Dr. Harris sealed the samples from the frosting and marked the testing kit. Marco kept the broken plate in place until he had photographed it, then covered the fragments without touching the smear of buttercream around them.
Ethan sat in a chair near the wall. His silver fork had been placed on a clean napkin beside him. He kept looking at it as though it had become something unfamiliar. Lily remained in my arms. She had grown heavy with exhaustion, but I did not put her down. The room was too large, and too many eyes had already turned her into the center of the danger.
Dominic stood near the cake table. His face had settled into the authority people expected from him, but fear had passed through it first. I had seen that much before he hid it. Now he watched Marco inspect the entrances and Dr. Harris close the kit.
The ballroom doors stayed open toward the service corridor.
That was what held my attention. The corridor was narrower than the ballroom, without chandeliers or guests. Its light was colder. Staff used it to move between the kitchen, storage rooms, and the event floor without crossing the celebration. From where I stood, I could see a strip of pale tile leading away from the marble.
Lily had looked there before she ran.
I carried her to the corridor. Marco followed, leaving the cake table under the protection of another security officer. Dominic came behind him. No one spoke. The silence continued, but it was no longer the silence of shock. It had become the silence of people measuring each other.
At the threshold, I stopped.
A faint line of white buttercream marked the floor near the base of the wall. It was not enough to prove anything. A server could have brushed against the cake. A plate could have tilted during preparation. The mark might have come from the broken slice itself, carried by a shoe or a careless hand.
But it was beyond the path Lily had taken across the ballroom.
Marco crouched beside it. He examined the mark without touching it, then followed the line of the corridor with his eyes. The nearest security camera faced the ballroom entrance. Its angle covered the marble and the first section of the service passage. Farther down, the corridor turned toward the cold rooms, and the camera's view ended before the turn.
The gap was not large. It was large enough.
I remembered Lily's small hand leaving mine. I remembered her certainty as she ran. She had not wandered toward the cake. She had crossed directly to it. Whatever she believed, she had believed before she entered the ballroom.
Dominic looked at me. His attention moved to Lily, then to the white mark near the wall. His question remained unspoken. The room behind us had already taught me what happened when a child acted without being believed.
Marco checked his radio. No response came through. He checked it again, then turned toward the cold-room passage. A door stood at the far end, partly closed. Its metal surface reflected a thin band of corridor light.
I adjusted Lily against my shoulder. Her face pressed into my neck. The weight of her made the choice simple, though not safe. If I stayed in the ballroom, she remained close to the broken cake and the people who wanted an explanation. If I followed the corridor, I stepped farther into a crisis that could cost me my work at the estate.
May you like
I moved toward the door.
Dominic did not stop me. Marco went ahead, placing one hand on the handle. The latch gave beneath his fingers, and the door began to open on the darkness beyond it.
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