Chapter 4 - THE SECRET UNDER THE FLOORThe SUV was towed to the police station.
Detectives searched it for nearly three hours.
When they finally opened the spare-tire compartment, they found no drugs.
No weapons.
No cash.
Instead, there was a small metal box.
Locked.
The box had no label.
No key.
But inside my house, three days later, police found the key.
Daniel had hidden it behind a framed photograph in our bedroom.
The photograph was from our wedding.
I remembered taking it.
We had been standing beneath an arch of white flowers.
Daniel was smiling.
I was smiling.
We looked happy.
Now I couldn't look at it without wondering whether he had already been lying to me that day.
Detective Alvarez brought the metal box to my hospital room.
“Do you recognize it?”
“No.”
She placed it on the table.
“This was inside your vehicle.”
“What is it?”
“We're about to find out.”
The key turned.
The lid opened.
Inside were papers.
A passport.
A USB drive.
Two photographs.
And a handwritten note.
The note had only one sentence.
She doesn't know what she owns.
I stared at it.
“Who wrote this?”
“We don't know yet.”
I looked at the photographs.
The first showed an old warehouse.
The second showed my father.
I stopped breathing.
My father had been dead for six years.
I had not seen that warehouse before.
But the expression on his face told me he had been there many times.
“Why would my father be in this box?”
Detective Alvarez picked up the USB drive.
“We found something on this.”
She connected it to a laptop.
A video appeared.
My father.
Sitting at a desk.
Alive.
Healthy.
Speaking directly into the camera.
My hands began shaking.
“If you're watching this,” he said, “something has gone wrong.”
I covered my mouth.
He continued.
“You may believe your husband is stealing from you.”
I stared at the screen.
“He isn't.”
The room seemed to tilt.
My father leaned closer to the camera.
“Daniel is looking for something.”
I whispered, “What?”
The recording continued.
“Something that belongs to your family.”
Then the video ended.
I looked at Detective Alvarez.
“What does my husband want?”
She shook her head.
“We don't know.”
“What belongs to my family?”
“We're trying to find out.”
The detective turned to the final document in the box.
It was a corporate registration.
The owner was my maiden name.
I didn't recognize the company.
Then I saw the signature.
My father's.
And beneath it was another name.
Mine.
I had apparently owned forty percent of a company I had never heard of.
The detective noticed my expression.
“You didn't know?”
“No.”
“How old were you when this was registered?”
I checked the date.
I was eighteen.
The company had existed for twenty-two years.
My father had created it before I was married.
Before I met Daniel.
Before I had Lily.
And apparently, Daniel had only discovered it last year.
The pieces began to form.
The money.
The shell company.
The house.
The car.
Vanessa.
The hidden documents.
Daniel wasn't trying to get rid of me simply because he wanted another woman.
He was trying to get access to something.
Something my father had left me.
But why had he waited nine years?
Then Detective Alvarez opened the passport from the metal box.
There was a photograph inside.
Not mine.
Not my father's.
Daniel's.
And on the next page was a visa stamp from a country I had never known he had visited.
The date was two years before our wedding.
Detective Alvarez looked at me.
“Your husband wasn't truthful about where he was before he met you.”
“What was he doing there?”
She looked at the photograph again.
“We don't know.”
Then her phone rang.
She listened.
Her expression changed.
“What happened?”
May you like
She ended the call.
“Vanessa is missing.”
