Chapter 2 - The Thing My Wife Hid Before She Died
My wife, Isabella, had died nine months earlier.
Officially, it had been a car accident on a rain-slick road just outside the city. The police report was brief. The funeral was crowded. The condolences came in waves. And through all of it, I had done what every stunned husband does when his whole life is ripped open in a single night—I tried to survive the next hour, then the next day, then the next week.
I had never once heard of a blue notebook.
That was what made Marina’s words so dangerous.
“She hid it away before you came home.”
Before I came home from where?
When?
And why did Marina know?
Edmund groaned from the floor beneath the scattered books.
Marina was still half-trapped under the collapsed armor, breathing hard, her face pale with fear.
Olivia ran straight to me and clung to my leg, her teddy bear wedged between us.
I lowered my voice for her.
“Sweetheart, go sit in that chair by the fireplace.”
She shook her head violently.
“No.”
Her little hand grabbed my sleeve even tighter.
I didn’t push. She had already seen too much.
So I kept one hand on her shoulder and flipped open the notebook.
The first page wasn’t a diary entry.
It was a list of names.
My name wasn’t there.
Edmund’s was.
So was Marina’s.
And next to both names, written in my wife’s unmistakable slanted handwriting, were two words:
Never Trust.
May you like
My stomach turned cold.
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