Chapter 8 - Someone had been inside my house
No obvious forced entry.
That meant very little.
Locks can be copied.
Doors can be left open.
People make mistakes.
But my home security showed one anomaly.
Three weeks earlier, power to the detached garage camera failed for twenty-two minutes.
No outage elsewhere.
Someone had disabled it locally.
That person accessed the toolbox.
Removed the ledger.
Left a photograph of Maya.
A warning.
Did Julian do it?
His location data placed him elsewhere.
Victor?
Unknown.
Then Maya remembered something.
“Daddy, a man came to your house.”
“When?”
“When you took me to soccer.”
“What man?”
“He said he was fixing something.”
I had hired no one.
“What did he look like?”
“Old.”
Scar near cheek?
Maya nodded.
Victor.
He had been inside my house.
Watching my daughter.
Searching for my father’s evidence.
Then the brass key was identified.
Private storage facility.
Old enough that electronic records didn’t capture the original rental details.
Box registered under my father’s company.
Investigators obtained access lawfully.
Inside:
No ledger.
Empty.
Except for a note.
Daniel,
If you’re reading this, Victor found the first copy.
There is another.
Dad.
My father had anticipated failure.
The note included coordinates.
Not GPS-style precision.
A survey reference tied to one of his old projects.
Thomas Blake recognized it.
A rural storage property purchased decades earlier.
When investigators arrived, the building was burned.
Recently.
Fresh ash.
Someone was staying ahead.
Then Elena finally came in.
Not to my house.
To the police station.
She looked exhausted.
Maya refused to see her at first.
That crushed Elena.
But she accepted it.
Good.
No guilt manipulation.
No “I’m your mother.”
She waited.
Then she handed detectives a flash drive.
“My private investigator sent this before he disappeared.”
Sophie’s father.
Grant.
The files contained photographs of Victor alive.
Julian meeting him.
Samuel Harris.
Alive.
The photograph was dated seven months earlier.
Mrs. Harris collapsed when she saw it.
May you like
Her supposedly dead husband had survived fifteen years.
And he had been meeting Victor voluntarily.
