Chapter 4
Daniel called me at ten that night.
I was sitting on Mia’s couch, going through old Hale family photos on my Facebook, looking for any trace of Ryan’s gambling, when my phone buzzed in my hand. It was an unknown number, but I answered anyway.
“Vivian.”
It was Daniel.
His voice was rough, like he’d been crying. Or drinking. Or both. I froze, my throat tight, not sure what to say. The last time he’d spoken to me, he’d banned me from our home, from our daughter, from everything I loved.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “In person. Now. Not at the house. Meet me at the diner on Mockingbird. The one we went to on our third date.”
He hung up before I could answer.
I grabbed my keys, my hands shaking so bad I dropped them twice. Mia looked up from her laptop, raising an eyebrow.
“Daniel?” she said. “You want me to come with you?”
I shook my head. “No. I need to do this alone. If he’s calling me, there’s a chance he’s starting to doubt Ryan. If you’re there, he’ll get defensive. He’ll shut down.”
She nodded, handing me a pepper spray keychain she kept by the door. “Text me every five minutes. If you don’t, I’m calling the cops. And bringing my baseball bat.”
I drove to the diner in ten minutes flat, running two red lights. The parking lot was half empty, the neon sign flickering pink above the door. Daniel was sitting in the back booth, the same one we’d sat in seven years before, when he’d told me he loved me for the first time.
He looked terrible.
His suit was wrinkled, his hair a mess, dark circles under his eyes. There was a half-empty coffee in front of him, gone cold. He didn’t look up when I slid into the booth across from him.
“Lily had another nightmare last night,” he said, his voice flat. “Third one in a row. She woke up screaming for you. She kept saying ‘Uncle Ryan is going to hurt Grandma.’ Over and over. I didn’t know what to do. I just held her until she fell back asleep.”
He looked up at me, and his eyes were glistening.
“I found these in Grandma’s desk today.” He pushed a stack of envelopes across the table. They were all open, all stamped with the same debt collector’s logo. “Almost three hundred thousand dollars. Gambling debts. All in Ryan’s name. Grandma had been paying them off for two years. The last one is dated last week. She wrote ‘NO MORE’ across the front in red pen. I remember now. She and Ryan had a huge fight in the kitchen last Saturday. I heard her say she was cutting him off completely. That he’d get nothing when she died.”
He paused, swallowing hard.
“Vivian… did Lily say something to you that day? At the house? Before the cops took you away?”
My heart was hammering so hard I could hear it in my ears. This was it. The moment I’d been waiting for. The moment he might finally believe me.
“She pulled me aside,” I said, my voice shaking. “Right before Ryan walked in. She whispered in my ear. She said Ryan told her to say I pushed Grandma. She said he told her Grandma would give him all the money if I went away. She said he threatened to hurt Grandma more if she told anyone the truth.”
Daniel closed his eyes. A tear slid down his cheek, dropping onto the Formica table.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. “God, Vivian, I’m so sorry. I believed him. I believed my mother. I looked at you, covered in Mom’s blood, and I thought the worst of you. I took our daughter away from you. I almost destroyed everything.”
He reached across the table, his hand hovering over mine, like he was scared I’d pull away.
“I was an idiot,” he said. “I let Ryan manipulate me. I let my mother’s hatred of you get in my head. I should have known you’d never hurt anyone. Least of all Grandma. She loved you. You were the only one who ever bothered to listen to her stories about the old days.”
I put my hand on his. His skin was warm, familiar. For the first time since that Sunday, I felt like I could breathe again.
“We have to prove it,” I said. “Ryan deleted the security footage. He says there’s no backup. But Sarah, the nurse, says Grandma mumbled Ryan’s name. We have the debt letters. We have Lily’s word. We just need more.”
Daniel nodded, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I know where Grandma kept the backup drive for the security system. She never trusted the cloud. She had a physical hard drive, hidden somewhere in her closet. She told me once, after Ryan stole her diamond bracelet last Christmas. She said ‘If anything ever happens to me, check the back of my shoe box. The one with the red laces.’”
He pulled out his wallet, sliding a photo of Lily across the table. She was grinning, covered in ice cream, holding her floppy rabbit.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll go get Lily from preschool. We’ll talk to her, properly, somewhere she feels safe. Then we’ll go to the house, get the drive, and end this. Once and for all.”
I picked up the photo, running my finger over Lily’s face. I’d missed her so much it hurt. Every second of every day, I ached to hold her, to kiss her forehead, to tell her she was safe.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
May you like
We sat there for another hour, talking, catching up on everything we’d missed in three terrible days. For the first time since the fall, I felt like we were a team again.
Ryan didn’t know what was coming for him.
