Garrett stood so fast the chair fell backward. “What?”
“She was found in a service stairwell of the Palmer Hotel at 5:40 a.m. Apparent overdose.”
I pressed a hand to my mouth.
Not for Melissa.
For the person behind her.
Because dead women do not send text messages.
My father turned. “Vanessa.”
The investigator nodded. “We believe so.”
Garrett looked between us, dazed. “Who is Vanessa?”
My father did not answer him.
He looked at me instead, and in his eyes I saw the past I had never been told.
Ten years ago, Vanessa Hale had been brilliant, ruthless, and reckless. She worked as a financial analyst under my father, until she secretly transferred client files to a rival bidder during a billion-dollar merger. William Sterling had exposed her. The SEC followed. Her career ended. Her father’s investment firm collapsed. Her family name became poison.
“She blamed me,” my father said. “She told me one day I would understand what it meant to lose family.”
I stared at him. “And you never told me?”
“I believed she was gone.”
“People like that don’t vanish,” I said. “They wait.”
The words surprised me with their bitterness.
My father closed his eyes briefly.
Garrett stepped toward me, shattered and shaking. “Claire, I swear I didn’t know.”
I looked at him for a long time.
The man who had missed eighteen calls. The man whose affair had opened the door to a monster. The man who had loved Ethan lazily, conveniently, when it did not cost him pleasure.
“I know,” I said.
Hope flickered in his eyes.
Then I killed it.
“But not knowing doesn’t make you innocent.”
A police detective entered minutes later.
