Chapter 2 - The Woman They Thought Had DisappearedVivian recovered faster than I expected.
Not music.
Not conversation.
Laughter.
A woman’s laughter.
Sharp, delighted, cruel.
I stopped inside the double front doors of the Hale estate with one hand still wrapped around the handle of my suitcase.
For six years, I had avoided this house.
Six years since I’d walked out after the worst fight of my life with my father.
Six years since Vivian Hale, my stepmother, had stood behind him with one hand on his shoulder, pretending to comfort him while quietly making sure there would never be room for me in his life again.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t come back.
Then my father called me three nights ago.
He didn’t say hello.
He whispered four words.
“Emily, I need you.”
The line went dead.
Every call after that went unanswered.
So I boarded the first flight from Boston to Dallas.
And now I was standing beneath the enormous crystal chandelier of the house where I had grown up, listening to Vivian laugh somewhere beyond the foyer.
“Come on, Richard,” she called. “Surely you can do better than that.”
My blood turned cold.
I dropped my suitcase.
“Dad?”
The laughter stopped.
I walked around the marble column separating the foyer from the grand living room.
Then I saw him.
My father was on the floor.
Richard Hale, the man who had built Hale Construction from a borrowed pickup truck into a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was crawling across the polished marble on his hands and one knee.
His left leg dragged uselessly behind him.
There was a white bandage around his wrist.
His face was gray with pain.
Several prescription bottles were scattered across the floor beside a shattered porcelain cup.
And standing above him in a red dress and matching heels was Vivian.
One heel rested on the edge of his blue shirt.
Not hard enough to crush him.
Just hard enough to humiliate him.
My twenty-eight-year-old stepbrother, Marcus, leaned against the staircase railing with his arms folded.
He was smiling.
On his wrist was my father’s gold watch.
My mother’s watch.
She had given it to Dad on their twenty-fifth anniversary, three months before cancer took her from us.
For one second, nobody moved.
Then Dad looked up.
His eyes met mine.
Shame flashed across his face.
“Emily.”
Vivian stepped away from him so quickly she nearly spilled the champagne in her hand.
“Emily!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
I didn’t answer.
I crossed the marble floor and knelt beside my father.
“Dad, can you stand?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re crawling.”
“I fell.”
Behind me, Vivian let out a breathless laugh.
“He’s been stubborn ever since the accident. The doctor said he should use the walker, but you know Richard.”
I looked at the shattered cup.
The pills.
Then my father’s trembling hands.
“What happened to your wrist?”
“Nothing.”
“Dad.”
Marcus pushed away from the railing.
“Maybe you should stop interrogating him five minutes after arriving.”
I turned.
Marcus had always enjoyed pretending this house belonged to him.
Now he carried himself like he no longer needed to pretend.
Expensive suit.
My father’s watch.
My father’s confidence.
My father’s home.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
Marcus smiled.
“Car accident. Six weeks ago.”
“Nobody told me.”
Vivian lifted one shoulder.
“We assumed you were busy.”
“My father nearly died and you assumed I was busy?”
“You haven’t exactly behaved like a daughter for the last six years.”
There it was.
The weapon she had sharpened carefully and used against me for years.
I looked at my father.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
That hurt more than Vivian’s words.
I helped him sit against the base of a column.
He flinched when I touched his ribs.
“Hospital,” I said.
“No.”
“You can barely move.”
“I said no.”
Vivian sighed dramatically.
“See what I deal with?”
I looked up at her.
For the first time, her confidence flickered.
Maybe it was something in my face.
Or maybe she had realized I was no longer the twenty-four-year-old daughter she had helped drive out of Texas.
Six years can change a person.
They had certainly changed me.
When I left Dallas, I had been angry, broke, and desperate to prove I could survive without the Hale name.
I had done more than survive.
But Vivian didn’t know that.
Neither did Marcus.
And apparently, neither did my father.
“Where are his medications?” I asked.
Vivian gestured toward the bottles.
“Right there.”
I picked one up.
Oxycodone.
Prescribed ten days earlier.
The bottle should have contained more than twenty tablets.
There were three.
Another bottle contained blood pressure medication.
Empty.
The refill date was two weeks away.
I looked at Dad.
His gaze dropped.
That told me enough.
I stood.
Marcus gave me an amused smile.
“You planning to play detective?”
“No.”
I reached into my coat pocket.
Vivian’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
But I saw it.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I pulled out my phone.
For forty-eight hours before my flight, I had been doing something Vivian would never have expected.
Listening.
My father had forgotten about the old home-security account connected to the Hale Construction corporate cloud.
Vivian had forgotten too.
But I hadn’t.
The mansion’s upgraded system had been installed through a subsidiary I once helped my father create.
Audio backups still existed.
Including one recorded forty-three hours earlier in this room.
I tapped the file.
Vivian’s own voice filled the mansion.
“If he refuses to sign again, double the pills tonight. He’ll be confused enough by morning.”
Marcus’s recorded voice answered.
“And if Emily comes back?”
Vivian laughed.
“She won’t. Richard made sure of that years ago.”
Then my father’s weak voice came through the speaker.
“Vivian, please…”
And hers answered coldly.
“Sign the transfer, Richard. Or next time you fall, I may not call anyone.”
Silence swallowed the mansion.
Marcus’s smile vanished.
My father closed his eyes.
And Vivian’s face went completely white.
I lowered the phone.
“You asked what I’m doing here,” I said.
May you like
I looked directly into her eyes.
“I came home to finish what you started.”
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