Chapter 1 - The Notebook in the Cabinet
The study had always been my wife’s favorite room.
Dark wood cabinets lined the walls. Tall bookshelves towered over the marble floor. The fireplace was cold that afternoon, but the room still carried her presence in the neatness she used to insist on, the faint trace of rosewood polish, the old suit of antique armor standing by the wall like a silent guard from another century.
That was the room I walked into just in time to watch everything shatter.
Olivia, my six-year-old daughter, stood near the cabinet in her cream-colored dress, clutching her teddy bear so tightly its stitched arm was twisted in her fist. Her face was already streaked with tears.
In front of her, Edmund and Marina were tearing through the cabinet like two desperate animals.
Files flew out first.
Then storage boxes.
Then framed papers and loose folders.
Everything hit the floor in a frantic rain of paper and wood.
They found nothing.
And that was when Edmund turned his rage on my child.
He wheeled around and slapped Olivia hard across the face.
The sound cracked through the study.
Olivia sobbed and stumbled, but she never let go of the teddy bear.
Then she cried out in a broken voice that froze the whole room:
“Mommy told me never to let Edmund find it!”
At that same instant, Marina reached deeper into the cabinet and found a blue leather-bound notebook hidden behind a false stack of old ledgers.
Her face changed.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
She snatched it up and moved as if to tear it apart.
That was when I stepped through the doorway.
I saw my daughter crying.
I saw Edmund looming over her.
I saw Marina holding the notebook.
Both of them froze.
Marina reacted first. She shoved the notebook under her coat, but one corner of blue leather still showed through the fabric.
“She hid it away before you came home,” she said.
I knew that notebook the second I saw it.
My wife’s notebook.
My dead wife’s notebook.
And then I looked at Edmund.
I crossed the room in two strides and drove my foot into his stomach.
He flew backward into the tall bookshelf.
Books tumbled down over him as the shelf shuddered and he crumpled to the floor, dazed and gasping.
Marina bolted for the door.
I grabbed the nearest thick book from a side table and hurled it at her back.
It struck hard enough to send her crashing into the antique armor.
The armor collapsed around her in a thunder of metal.
The helmet rolled across the marble floor.
The shield slammed onto the rug.
And the blue notebook flew free from under her coat.
I picked it up.
Opened the first page.
Then looked down at both of them.
“LET’S SEE WHAT’S IN THESE PAGES THAT SCARES YOU SO MUCH.”
And in that terrible silence, I suddenly realized something even worse than the notebook itself.
May you like
Marina had known exactly what she was looking for.
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