Chapter 1
While my husband was hitting me, our eight-year-old daughter ran upstairs and called the one man Ryan had spent years trying to avoid. Ten minutes later, my father walked through our door and said five words that made Ryan turn white.
My name is Emily, and I lived outside Chicago with my husband, Ryan, and our daughter, Lily.
That night, Ryan came home already furious.
“Where were you this afternoon?”
“At Lily’s school. I told you.”
“You’re lying.”
Before I could answer, he grabbed my arm.
“Ryan, stop.”
Lily was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework.
“Daddy, leave Mommy alone.”
Ryan turned toward her.
“Go upstairs.”
She didn’t move.
Then Ryan shoved me against the wall.
Lily screamed.
“Stop hurting Mommy!”
Ryan grabbed me again and struck me.
That was when Lily ran upstairs.
Ryan barely noticed because he was still shouting at me.
“You think you can embarrass me?”
Upstairs, Lily locked herself inside my bedroom and found my phone on the nightstand.
Her hands were shaking when she called my father.
“Grandpa?”
Charles Whitmore was at a private dinner downtown when he answered.
“Lily? What’s wrong?”
She started crying.
“Daddy is hurting Mommy.”
There was a long silence.
Then my father asked, “Is he still there?”
“Yes.”
“Lock the door and stay inside.”
Downstairs, Ryan suddenly heard my phone ringing above us.
His head snapped toward the staircase.
“Who is she calling?”
I said nothing.
He started toward the stairs.
Then headlights flooded our living room windows.
One black SUV stopped outside.
Then another.
Then two more.
Ryan slowly turned toward me.
“What did you do?”
I hadn’t done anything.
The front door opened, and my father walked inside with two men behind him.
Ryan froze.
“Mr. Whitmore…”
My father looked at me on the floor, then at Ryan.
But he didn’t shout.
Instead, he reached into his coat, placed a thick folder on the table, and quietly said five words.
“I know what you really did.”
Ryan’s face lost all its color.
Then I noticed the name printed across the top page of the folder.
May you like
It wasn’t mine.
It belonged to a woman who had disappeared three years before I married him.
