Chapter 3
The first night in the stone house was the longest night of my life.
Lila cried herself to sleep, asking when Daddy was coming to get her. I lay in bed beside her, stroking her hair, telling her over and over that everything was going to be okay, even though I didn’t believe it myself.
At two in the morning, I got up and went downstairs. Crawford had left a stack of files on the kitchen table. All of them had my name on them.
I opened the first one.
It was a copy of my birth certificate. My legal name: Emily Marie Bennett. I’d gone by Emily Carter for eleven years. I’d signed tax returns, credit card applications, Lila’s birth certificate with a name that wasn’t mine.
The next file was Ryan’s rap sheet.
Ryan Cole. Born in a small town in Ohio. Arrested at nineteen for stealing cars. At twenty-two for check fraud. At twenty-five, he’d married his first wife, a woman named Linda Marlow from Tulsa. She’d had a small inheritance from her grandmother. Ryan had cleaned out her bank accounts and disappeared six months after the wedding. She’d killed herself two years later.
I dropped the file on the table. My hands were shaking.
Linda Marlow. She’d been twenty-eight when she died. The same age I was when I married Ryan.
The next file was about his second wife. Clara Bennett. He’d used the name Ryan Bennett with her. They’d married in 2012, two years before he met me. They had two kids: Jake, twelve, and Mia, ten. He’d told Clara he was an oil consultant who had to travel for work. He’d be gone for months at a time. He’d told me the same thing.
He’d been living two lives for eleven years. Two wives. Three kids.
And he’d almost gotten away with it.
I heard a car pull up the gravel drive. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen block and stood by the door. My heart was pounding.
The front door opened. It was Crawford. He held up his hands when he saw the knife.
“Easy. It’s just me.”
I put the knife down. “What are you doing here at three in the morning?”
“Someone tried to break into the mansion an hour ago. It was Ryan. He took a few things—clothes, his passport, some jewelry you left in the bedroom. But he didn’t get the money. The accounts are still frozen.”
I sat down at the table. “He’s going to come here, isn’t he?”
“Not if he’s smart. We have two men patrolling the property twenty-four seven. He won’t get within a hundred yards of this house without us knowing.”
He looked at the files spread out on the table. His face softened.
“You didn’t have to read all that tonight.”
“I needed to know who I married.” I picked up the photo of Linda Marlow. She was pretty, with curly red hair and a smile that looked a lot like mine. “Did he kill her?”
“The police ruled it a suicide. But I don’t believe it. Neither does her sister. We’re reopening the case.”
I stared at the photo. That could have been me. If Crawford hadn’t shown up when he did, that would have been me.
The next morning, Lila woke up and asked for pancakes. I made them, just the way she liked them—chocolate chips shaped like a smiley face. She ate two bites, then pushed her plate away.
“Mommy? Is Daddy in trouble?”
I sat down across from her. I didn’t want to lie to her. She deserved the truth, even if it hurt.
“Yes, baby. He did some very bad things.”
“Like what?”
I took a deep breath. “He lied to us. About a lot of things. He has another family. A wife and two kids. He’s been lying to them too.”
Lila’s eyes filled with tears. “So I have a brother and sister?”
I nodded. “Yes. Jake and Mia.”
“Are they nice?”
I reached across the table and held her hand. “I don’t know, baby. But I’m sure they are.”
“Can I meet them?”
The question caught me off guard. I’d been so focused on hating Ryan, on getting revenge, that I hadn’t thought about the other kids. They were victims too. Just like Lila. Just like Clara.
“Maybe someday,” I said. “When everything is safe.”
There was a knock at the door. One of Crawford’s men stood on the porch.
“Mrs. Bennett? There’s a woman here to see you. Says her name is Vanessa Miller.”
I stood up. “What?”
“She says she has information about Ryan. Says she’s sorry. She’ll only talk to you.”
Crawford shook his head. “Don’t do it, Emily. She’s just as bad as he is.”
But I was already walking toward the door.
Vanessa was standing on the porch, her hair a mess, no makeup on. She looked different from the woman who’d smiled when Ryan slapped me. She looked scared.
“Emily, please. Let me explain.”
“Explain what? How you laughed when he hit me? How you knew he was married and still slept with him?”
“I didn’t know about the other wife!” Her voice cracked. “I swear to God. He told me his wife died of cancer three years ago. He told me Lila didn’t have a mom. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was helping her.”
I stared at her. It was the same lie he’d told Linda. The same lie he’d told Clara. The same lie he’d told me when we first met—his parents were dead, he had no family, he was all alone in the world.
“I have proof,” Vanessa said. She held up a USB drive. “He kept records of everything. All the money he stole. All the fake identities. He was going to leave the country next week. He was going to take the money and go to Brazil. He wasn’t going to take me. He wasn’t even going to take Lila. I heard him on the phone last night. He said the kid was a liability.”
A liability.
My daughter. The little girl who’d made him macaroni necklaces for Father’s Day. Who’d run to the door every night yelling “Daddy’s home!” Who still cried herself to sleep asking for him.
I grabbed the USB drive from her hand.
“If you’re lying,” I said, “I will make sure you go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“I’m not lying.” She looked past me, toward the kitchen where Lila was standing in the doorway. “Tell her I’m sorry. For everything.”
She turned and walked to her car. She drove away, leaving a cloud of dust behind her.
I walked back into the house. Lila was looking at me, her head tilted to the side.
“Who was that, Mommy?”
“Nobody, baby.” I slipped the USB drive into my pocket. “Just someone who had a lot of lies to tell.”
That afternoon, Crawford plugged the drive into his laptop. What we found on it made me sick.
Bank records. Wire transfers. Fake passports with Ryan’s face and four different names. Audio recordings of him laughing about how stupid his wives were. How easy it was to manipulate us.
And a video.
It was taken three months earlier. Ryan was sitting in our home office, talking on the phone.
“Yeah, the Bennett broad is wrapped around my finger. She trusts me with everything. Six more months, and I’ll have every last penny of that trust fund. Then I’ll disappear. Maybe I’ll stage a car crash. Just like her parents. Worked once, it’ll work again.”
I stared at the screen. My blood turned to ice.
He’d killed my parents.
May you like
The car crash that had taken them when I was twenty-two. The crash the police had said was caused by a drunk driver who’d never been found.
It had been Ryan all along.
