Chapter 2 - THE SHED ADRIAN SAID WAS EMPTY
The police entered the Hawthorne dining room expecting panic.
What they found was control.
Mine.
I was still on the floor, pale and shaking, but breathing. Adrian had stepped back. Margaret stood frozen. Celeste looked like she wished she had never come. Charles remained seated, though the hand holding his wineglass had tightened.
Officer Grant, the first one through the door, looked from my face to the papers on the floor to the injector beside my boot.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“A murder attempt,” I said.
Adrian laughed too fast. “My wife is unstable. She had a reaction. We were about to help her.”
Margaret nodded eagerly. “She’s dramatic. She always has been.”
I held up the flash drive.
“Then I’m sure you won’t mind if the officers watch the dining-room footage.”
That silence was worth more than breathing.
Because I had installed cameras in three places the day before: the dining room, the west hallway, and the garden path leading to the old locked shed.
Margaret lunged before the officer could take the drive, but Officer Grant caught her wrist.
Her face changed instantly—from elegant widow-in-training to cornered animal.
The footage from the dining room was enough to turn the air to ice.
It showed Adrian adding a small vial of shellfish oil to my plate while Margaret stood guard by the door.
It showed Margaret removing my EpiPen from my purse ten minutes before dinner.
It showed Adrian sliding the divorce papers under his place setting and smiling when I sat down.
Celeste made a small, horrified sound.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
Adrian turned on her so fast it startled even me.
“Shut up.”
The second video was worse.
It came from the garden path.
At 1:14 that morning, Adrian and Charles had walked to the old shed carrying shovels and a long metal case.
At 1:36, they came back without the case.
Officer Grant looked at me. “What’s in the shed?”
I met Adrian’s eyes.
“That,” I said, “depends on whether his first wife stayed buried.”
Margaret let out a sharp, broken breath.
Charles stood so suddenly his chair scraped backward across the floor.
“You have no warrant for that building,” he snapped.
But Officer Grant was already calling it in.
And when the second patrol unit arrived, the first thing they did was head for the garden.
Adrian tried to move toward the hallway.
He got two steps before an officer stopped him.
Twenty minutes later, under the beam of floodlights and rain, a crowbar cracked the rusted shed lock open.
Inside, under gardening tools and paint cans, there was a trapdoor.
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And beneath that trapdoor… was a hidden room no one in the Hawthorne family had ever admitted existed.
Cliffhanger: The room beneath the shed did not contain a body. It contained something far worse for Adrian—proof that Lydia had not vanished at all.
