Chapter 1 - THE OLDEST FOLDER
The oldest folder was dated four months before my wedding.
That should have been impossible.
I had not lived in this house then, and Dererick and I had only been engaged for six weeks.
My hand hovered over the trackpad while the bedroom clock changed from 3:04 to 3:05 a.m.
Then I clicked the first image.
For a second, I did not understand what I was looking at.
It was me.
I was asleep on a cream-colored sofa in Dererick's old apartment, wearing the blue dress I had worn to his company Christmas party.
My head was turned toward the back cushion.
One shoe was missing.
My left arm had been positioned above my head.
A small square of fabric had been cut from the lining near the hem of my dress.
I remembered that dress.
I remembered waking the next morning with a headache and laughing when Dererick told me I had fallen asleep before midnight.
I remembered him making coffee and teasing me for being unable to handle two glasses of wine.
I also remembered something else now.
I had only had half a glass.
The next photograph showed the same room from a different angle.
The next showed my wrist turned outward.
The next showed a dark mark near my elbow that I had assumed came from bumping into a table.
There were forty-three photographs in that folder.
I clicked the next date.
Me again.
Different night.
Different clothes.
Same careful arrangement.
My breathing became shallow.
This had started before the tea.
Before the unexplained mornings.
Before the bruises I had finally noticed.
The tea was not the beginning.
It was only the first part I had recognized.
I scrolled farther.
A folder labeled BASELINE sat between two dates.
Inside were ordinary photographs of me eating dinner, walking through a parking lot, reading on a balcony, carrying groceries, and laughing with friends.
They had clearly been taken without my knowledge.
Several were from across the street from my old apartment.
One was taken through the front window of the cafe where I used to meet my best friend, Meredith Shaw.
I stared at that picture longer than the others.
Meredith was seated across from me, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup while I talked.
Someone had drawn a white circle around my face.
In the lower corner, a typed note read, SUBJECT DISPLAYS CONSISTENT ROUTINE.
Subject.
Not Anna.
Not wife.
Not fiancee.
Subject.
My skin went cold.
I backed out of the folder.
There were documents mixed among the photographs.
Most had meaningless filenames made of numbers.
One was a spreadsheet.
I opened it.
The first column contained dates.
The second listed locations.
The third contained brief notes.
Dinner with M.
Gym canceled.
Mother out of state.
Work travel confirmed.
No pets.
Lives alone.
High compliance after reassurance.
I stopped reading.
The room seemed to tilt around me.
This was not a husband secretly developing some terrible habit after our marriage.
This was a man who had studied me before he married me.
He had recorded my schedule.
My family.
My habits.
How easily I accepted reassurance.
I clicked another file.
It was a scanned document from a law office.
My name appeared at the top.
Below it were references to my ownership stake in Hawthorne Media Group, the regional publishing company my father had built before his death.
I owned thirty-two percent of the company through a family holding structure.
Dererick knew I was comfortable financially.
He did not know every detail.
At least, I had believed he did not.
The document on the screen included details I had never given him.
Estimated valuation.
Voting rights.
Insurance coverage.
Beneficiary information.
My mouth went dry when I reached the final section.
CURRENT SPOUSAL EXPOSURE AFTER MARRIAGE: FAVORABLE.
I did not know what that meant.
I knew I hated it.
Then I saw another folder.
ELISE M.
It was not my name.
I clicked it.
A woman I had never seen before appeared on the screen.
She looked about my age.
Dark hair.
Gray sweater.
A tired smile.
The first photograph looked harmless.
The second did not.
She was asleep.
Her arm had been moved across a pillow in almost exactly the same position Dererick had placed mine less than an hour earlier.
I clicked faster.
The same small bruises appeared along her arms.
The same disheveled clothing.
The same angles.
The same clinical repetition.
Then the dates stopped.
The final file was a newspaper clipping.
LOCAL CONSULTANT DIES IN APPARENT ACCIDENT.
I could hear my own pulse in my ears.
The article said twenty-nine-year-old Elise Morgan had been found dead after what investigators believed was a tragic accident in her home.
Police had found no evidence of forced entry.
Friends told reporters she had been exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed in the weeks before her death.
I read that sentence three times.
Emotionally overwhelmed.
The same phrase Dererick had started using about me whenever I complained about feeling strange in the mornings.
"You've been overwhelmed lately, Anna."
"You need more rest."
"You're working too hard."
Before I closed the folder, I noticed one more detail in Elise's file.
Every photograph had a code in the lower corner.
Mine had the same style of code.
The letters were different, but the numbering pattern matched.
It made the archive feel less like Dererick's private collection and more like a catalog.
I opened the properties panel on one image and found a field labeled REVIEWED.
Beside it was a date and the initials M.H.
Martin Hale did not mean anything to me yet.
At that moment, it was only two letters attached to a stranger's suffering.
Then I found another notation.
COMPLIANCE IMPROVING AFTER PARTNER REASSURANCE.
I stared at the sentence until my eyes burned.
I remembered dozens of small conversations with Dererick.
Whenever I questioned why I slept so deeply, he told me I was finally relaxing around him.
Whenever I woke with a bruise, he laughed softly and said I had always been clumsy.
Whenever I forgot part of an evening, he filled in the missing pieces with details that sounded believable.
He never argued aggressively.
He reassured.
The file had turned that tenderness into a technique.
I clicked through my own older photographs again and realized the camera often captured a clock or television screen somewhere in the room.
The images were not only documenting how I looked.
They were proving time.
Proving sequence.
Proving that a future investigator could place me in specific positions on specific nights.
That was when I understood why the photographs were so repetitive.
Repetition creates familiarity.
If someone later saw one terrible final image, Dererick could produce twenty earlier ones and say, "See? She did this before."
The thought made me press my palm against my mouth to keep from making a sound.
I opened a text note connected to one of my dates.
Subject asked about bruising.
Partner response effective.
No escalation.
My own question had been recorded as part of the plan.
I remembered that morning perfectly.
I had stood in the bathroom wearing a towel and pointed to a mark on my shoulder.
"Did I hit something last night?"
Dererick had looked at it, frowned with concern, and kissed the skin beside it.
"You probably bumped the nightstand."
Then he had made pancakes.
I had spent the rest of breakfast feeling foolish for worrying.
Now the file told me he had been measuring whether I accepted the explanation.
High compliance after reassurance.
My stomach turned.
I no longer knew which memories belonged to our marriage and which belonged to his work.
A photograph from our engagement party caught my attention.
Dererick was smiling beside me, champagne raised toward the camera.
In the background, Meredith stood near the doorway speaking to someone outside the frame.
A note beneath the image read ACCESS NETWORK STABLE.
I almost closed the laptop then.
Instead, I forced myself to keep reading because fear had already cost Elise the chance to explain what happened to her.
I did not know who she was.
I did not know whether anyone had believed her.
But I knew I was looking at the record she never got to show anyone.
That made every second before Dererick returned feel borrowed.
I wanted to call someone immediately, but every name that came to mind felt dangerous.
My mother might call Dererick.
Meredith definitely would.
My uncle would ask questions I could not answer fast enough.
Even the police felt impossible while I was still sitting beside an unlocked archive that could disappear before sunrise.
So I made myself think like the person Dererick believed I was not.
Quiet.
Methodical.
Hard to redirect.
I stopped trying to understand the whole plan and focused on preserving one piece of it before the bedroom door opened.
A sound outside snapped my head toward the window.
Tires on wet pavement.
A car door.
My blood turned to ice.
Dererick.
I looked at the clock.
3:18 a.m.
He had been gone less than twenty minutes.
I had no idea how long it would take him to reach the bedroom.
I grabbed my phone and photographed the screen.
One picture.
Two.
Five.
Ten.
My hands shook so badly that half of them blurred.
I opened the desk drawer and found an old flash drive beneath a stack of receipts.
I jammed it into the laptop.
The computer recognized it.
I dragged the entire evidence folder toward the drive.
A window appeared.
COPYING 8,412 ITEMS.
Estimated time remaining: 47 minutes.
"No."
The word escaped before I could stop it.
I canceled the transfer.
Downstairs, the front door opened.
I could hear Dererick moving through the entryway.
I needed something smaller.
I searched by file type and selected the spreadsheets, documents, and the folders marked BASELINE and ELISE M.
COPYING 612 ITEMS.
Estimated time remaining: 6 minutes.
Too long.
A cabinet closed downstairs.
Then silence.
I selected only the documents and the Elise folder.
COPYING 97 ITEMS.
Estimated time remaining: 38 seconds.
I stared at the progress bar.
The first floor creaked.
Dererick was coming upstairs.
Thirty-one seconds.
I unplugged my phone from its charger and slid it under my pillow.
Twenty-four seconds.
His footsteps reached the hallway.
Eighteen seconds.
I could see his shadow beneath the bedroom door.
Eleven seconds.
The progress bar froze at ninety-two percent.
My stomach dropped.
The doorknob moved.
Then the copy window disappeared.
TRANSFER COMPLETE.
I yanked out the flash drive, shoved it inside the lining of my pillowcase, closed the laptop, and slid it back into the briefcase.
I had just enough time to push the case under the bed before the door opened.
Dererick stepped inside.
I was already beneath the blanket.
Eyes closed.
Breathing slowly.
Pretending to be drugged by a cup of tea I had never swallowed.
He stood in the doorway for a long time.
I felt him looking at me.
Then he crossed the room.
The mattress dipped beside my hip.
His fingers touched my hair.
"Anna?"
I did not move.
His hand remained there.
"Honey?"
Nothing.
He leaned closer.
I could smell rain on his jacket.
Then he whispered something so softly I almost missed it.
"You weren't supposed to wake up yet."
Every muscle in my body locked.
He stayed beside me for another ten seconds.
Then he stood and walked toward the bathroom.
The light clicked on.
Water ran briefly.
When he returned, he climbed into bed as though nothing had happened.
Within minutes, his breathing slowed.
I did not sleep.
At 6:42 a.m., Dererick's alarm went off.
He stretched, kissed my shoulder, and spoke in the same gentle voice he always used in the morning.
"How'd you sleep?"
I opened my eyes slowly.
I forced myself to look confused.
"Like a rock."
His expression changed for less than a second.
Relief.
Then the smile returned.
"Good."
He got out of bed.
"You needed it."
I watched him walk toward the bathroom.
The flash drive pressed against the inside of my pillow beneath my hand.
I had proof.
I had the name of a dead woman.
May you like
And I had just learned something even worse than the fact that my husband had planned this before our wedding.
He knew exactly how long I was supposed to stay unconscious.
