Chapter 4
clicked.
Inside were three thick ledgers, two external drives, a notary stamp, blank signature pages, photocopies of my old passport and driver’s license, and a velvet envelope containing a second passport application with my name and Vanessa’s photograph attached for review.
Ethan had been preparing more than one escape route.
On top of everything sat a burner phone.
I slipped it into my coat pocket and started stacking the ledgers into Daniel’s bag.
“Don’t,” a voice said behind me.
I turned so fast I hit the cabinet.
Vanessa stood in the doorway, pale under the hallway light.
Up close, she looked less polished than she had downstairs.
Her mascara had started to gather at the corners of her eyes.
She glanced at Daniel, then at the open safe, then at me.
“You should hate me,” she said.
The understatement was so absurd I almost laughed.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Her throat worked.
“To survive.”
Vanessa closed the door and spoke in a rush, like someone jumping from a moving car.
She admitted she had helped Ethan early on because he told her the shell companies were tax shelters and political slush funds everyone in his world used.
When my car was found near the bayou, he saw an opening.
He asked her to sign the affidavit about my mental state.
He promised it would only settle estate issues and keep reporters away.
By the time she understood he was shifting actual fraud into my identity, she was already implicated.
Three weeks earlier, she had overheard him tell a consultant that if regulators got too close, he would reopen the story of my disappearance, claim I had resurfaced to blackmail him, and make sure I was discredited before anyone heard me.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I said.
“Because I found out yesterday he moved money out of our joint accounts and had my assistant copy travel records to make it look like I approved the last transfers.” Her mouth trembled.
“He is going to leave me with you.”
She pulled a silver flash drive from her clutch and set it on the desk.
“There’s a recording.
He talks about the affidavit.
He talks about using your death to freeze questions.
I kept it because I thought maybe one day I’d need it.”
I wanted to throw her out of the room.
I wanted to ask how she had slept for two years with my life on her conscience.
But footsteps sounded in the hallway before I could decide which rage to choose.
Ethan came in hard enough that the door hit the wall.
He stopped dead when he saw me.
Every ounce of color drained from his face.
For a single exquisite second, the man who had dismantled my life looked afraid.
“Claire,” he said.
“That’s not possible.”
“It is when the dead get tired of being useful,” I said.
His shock lasted maybe three heartbeats.
Then I watched the old Ethan return, the one who could calculate faster than he could feel.
His eyes flicked to the safe, to Vanessa, to Daniel’s bag, to my coat pocket.
“Whatever Arthur told you, he’s using you.
You disappeared.
You were unstable.
There are records.”
May you like
“You made the records,” I said.
He took a step toward me, smile
