Chapter 2 - The Woman at 3:07 A.M.
The woman standing outside my apartment was bleeding.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Not the expensive coat hanging crookedly from her shoulders.
Not her bare feet.
Not the black SUV idling across the street with its headlights off.
The blood.
It ran from a cut above her eyebrow and disappeared beneath the collar of her white blouse.
She raised one trembling hand toward my peephole.
“Sarah,” she whispered.
My stomach dropped.
I had never seen her before.
But she knew my name.
Behind me, Chloe was crying in her bedroom.
“Mommy?”
I pressed one finger to my lips even though she couldn’t see me.
The woman knocked again, softer this time.
“Please. Harrison sent me.”
Every muscle in my body locked.
I pulled the USB from my robe pocket and held it in my fist.
“How do you know Harrison?” I asked through the door.
The woman looked over her shoulder toward the street.
“I was his nurse.”
I said nothing.
“He told me about the doll. He told me if he couldn't get out, I had to make sure it reached Chloe.”
My blood went cold.
“You mailed it?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because they found out.”
The black SUV across the street suddenly turned on its headlights.
The woman flinched.
“Sarah, if you don't open this door in the next ten seconds, we are both going to die.”
That was not the kind of sentence you weigh carefully.
I unlocked the deadbolt.
She slipped inside.
I locked it again immediately.
Up close, she looked around thirty-five, maybe younger beneath the bruising. Her dark hair had been hacked unevenly at one side, as though someone had grabbed it. There were red marks around one wrist.
“My name is Maya Torres,” she said.
Then she saw the doll lying on my kitchen table.
Her face changed.
“Oh, God.”
“What?”
“You opened it.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Did you watch the drive?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“There were four videos. I only watched the first.”
Maya grabbed my shoulders.
“You have to get Chloe out of here.”
I pulled away.
“Tell me what is happening.”
“There isn't time.”
“You came to my home bleeding in the middle of the night. You're going to make time.”
For one second, she stared at me.
Then she glanced toward Chloe's bedroom.
“Harrison isn't Victoria's only target.”
The sentence landed like ice water.
I thought about the unfinished video.
Her real target is—
“No.”
Maya's expression told me I already understood.
I shook my head.
“Chloe is five years old.”
“She turns six in eleven days.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Victoria knows everything about her.”
My stomach twisted.
I stepped toward Maya.
“If that woman has been watching my daughter—”
“Sarah, listen to me. Harrison's grandmother created a family trust before she died. Almost no one knew about it because the assets were tied up in litigation for years.”
“I don't know anything about a trust.”
“Neither did Harrison until six months ago.”
“How much?”
Maya swallowed.
“Forty-eight million dollars.”
For a moment, the room went completely silent.
Then I laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because the number was so absurd my brain refused to accept it.
“Harrison didn't have forty-eight million dollars.”
“It isn't Harrison's.”
Maya looked directly at me.
“It belongs to his biological child.”
I stopped laughing.
“No.”
“The trust activates when Chloe turns six. Until she turns eighteen, a court-appointed guardian controls the distributions.”
My legs suddenly felt weak.
“So Harrison controls it?”
“He would have.”
Would have.
The phrase frightened me more than the money.
Maya continued.
“But if Harrison is legally declared incompetent or dead, custody becomes the important part. Whoever controls Chloe can petition to control the trust.”
I stared toward my daughter's bedroom.
Three years.
Victoria had appeared three years ago.
Harrison had left us.
He had stopped paying support.
He had erased us from his life so completely that I had assumed greed had swallowed whatever decency remained in him.
“What are you saying?” I whispered. “That Victoria married Harrison because of Chloe?”
“I think Victoria married Harrison because of the trust.”
“Then why leave Chloe with me?”
“She couldn't touch the money yet.”
Maya's voice dropped.
“And she needed time to destroy Harrison.”
A sound came from the hallway outside.
Not a knock.
A metallic scrape.
Someone touching the lock.
Maya froze.
I did too.
The handle moved.
Very slowly.
“They're here,” she whispered.
I ran for Chloe.
My daughter was sitting upright in bed, hugging her blanket.
I grabbed sneakers, her jacket, and the emergency backpack I kept beneath the dresser.
“What are we doing?”
“We're going for a drive.”
“Is Daddy coming?”
The question nearly broke me.
“Not yet.”
A heavy thud struck the front door.
Maya appeared behind me.
“Fire stairs?”
“End of the hallway.”
Another crash.
Wood splintered.
I picked Chloe up.
We ran.
The apartment door burst inward just as I reached the rear hallway.
A man's voice shouted.
“Sarah!”
Not my name as a question.
My name as a command.
I pushed through the fire exit.
Cold night air hit my face.
We flew down the concrete stairs.
Third floor.
Second.
Somewhere above us, the door slammed open.
Footsteps followed.
Fast.
Maya grabbed my arm.
“Not the parking lot.”
“Why?”
“That's where they'll expect us.”
We reached the first-floor landing.
Instead of continuing down, Maya kicked open a maintenance door.
We entered a narrow laundry room filled with humming dryers.
Chloe buried her face against my neck.
“Mommy, I'm scared.”
“I know, baby.”
I kissed her hair.
“But you're with me.”
Maya opened a window above a folding table.
“Can you fit?”
“You expect me to climb through that with a five-year-old?”
“You have a better idea?”
Footsteps thundered in the stairwell.
I didn't.
Maya climbed first, dropped outside, then reached up.
I lifted Chloe through.
Maya caught her.
I followed.
My robe tore on the window frame.
We landed in an alley behind the building.
A battered gray sedan waited beside a dumpster.
Maya ran toward it.
“You planned this?”
“I planned to get you out if they came.”
That answer did not make me feel better.
We piled inside.
Maya started the engine.
As we pulled away, two men burst from the rear door of my apartment building.
One lifted a phone.
The other pointed directly at our car.
“Drive!”
Maya slammed the accelerator.
We shot down the alley.
Chloe was crying silently in the back seat.
I twisted around and reached for her hand.
“We're okay.”
I hated lying to my daughter.
But I was getting very good at it.
Maya took three sharp turns.
The SUV appeared behind us anyway.
“They've got a tracker,” she said.
“On your car?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I stole the car.”
I stared at her.
“You stole a car?”
“Technically it belongs to Victoria.”
That was when the first vehicle hit us.
A black sedan came through an intersection and clipped our rear bumper.
The car spun halfway around.
Chloe screamed.
Maya fought the wheel.
I reached back and held my daughter down against the seat.
“Keep your head low!”
The SUV approached from behind.
“They're trying to box us in.”
Maya accelerated again.
We crossed two lanes, horns exploding around us.
I looked at her bleeding forehead.
“How did you get away from Victoria?”
Maya's jaw tightened.
“I worked at the Sterling estate for seven months. Harrison was already sick when I arrived. They told me he had a neurological condition.”
“The pills.”
“Yes.”
“What were they?”
“Sedatives. Dissociatives. Memory suppressants. Enough to keep him confused, but not enough to make a toxicology panel obvious if the right doctor was signing off.”
“You knew?”
“Not at first.”
“What changed?”
“One night he recognized me.”
Her voice cracked.
“He grabbed my arm and said, ‘I have a daughter named Chloe. If I forget her tomorrow, don't believe me.’”
I turned away.
Whatever anger I had toward Harrison was still there.
He had abandoned us before Victoria ever locked him in a basement.
Nothing could erase that.
But the man in that video had remembered Chloe.
He had risked something to reach her.
Maya continued.
“I started skipping some doses. His memory came back in pieces. That's when he told me about the trust.”
“And Victoria found out.”
“Yes.”
The SUV behind us accelerated.
Maya made another turn.
“What happened tonight?” I asked.
“They discovered one of his recordings was missing. They searched his room. Then they searched mine.”
She touched the cut over her eyebrow.
“I ran.”
“Why send the doll to Chloe?”
“Because Harrison said Victoria would watch every package addressed to you.”
“But not one addressed to Chloe?”
“She thought anything from Harrison to Chloe would look like guilt. A cheap father trying to buy affection.”
The cruelty of it was brilliant.
Victoria had counted on my hatred.
I had almost thrown the doll away.
I looked at Chloe.
She was clutching the seatbelt.
“Did Daddy really tell you to save the doll?” I asked.
She nodded.
“When?”
“He called me.”
My heart stopped.
“What?”
“On Grandma's old phone.”
My mother had given Chloe an outdated phone for games.
No active service.
Only Wi-Fi.
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
“How long?”
Chloe thought carefully.
“Before Christmas.”
That was nine months ago.
“What did Daddy say?”
“He said not to tell because the bad woman checked secrets.”
Maya and I exchanged a look.
“What else did he say?”
Chloe's lower lip trembled.
“He said when I got the doll, I had to find the zipper.”
“There was no zipper,” I said.
Chloe shook her head.
“Not on the doll.”
The SUV suddenly disappeared behind us.
Maya slowed slightly.
“What zipper did he mean, sweetheart?”
Chloe pointed toward the backpack beside her.
“My pink coat.”
I had grabbed that coat from her closet minutes earlier.
I reached into the back seat and took it.
“There is no zipper except—”
Then I remembered.
A tiny hidden pocket inside the lining.
My mother had sewn it there for emergency money.
I opened it.
Something hard was inside.
Not money.
A small brass key.
Wrapped around it was a strip of paper.
Four words were written in Harrison's handwriting.
GREENHOUSE. FLOOR SEVEN. BOX 19.
Maya went pale.
“Oh, no.”
“What does it mean?”
“Harrison told me there was one place Victoria could never afford to let anyone search.”
“Where?”
Maya opened her mouth.
Before she could answer, headlights exploded through the passenger window.
A black SUV slammed into us at full speed.
Metal screamed.
Glass shattered.
May you like
Our car spun across the road.
And the last thing I heard before everything went dark was Chloe screaming my name.
