Chapter 11 - NINETY DAYS
The ninety-day window turned the entire case from terrifying to urgent.
Until that moment, I had thought Dererick's plan had no deadline.
Now I knew it did.
My family's shareholder agreement had been written twenty-three years earlier, when my father and two partners were still building Hawthorne Media.
It contained a complicated transfer provision designed to keep ownership from becoming trapped in probate after a shareholder's death.
For ninety days following the annual trust review, a surviving spouse could receive temporary voting rights before the shares were formally redistributed through the estate.
The clause was meant to protect families.
Dererick had found a way to make it dangerous.
"Could he keep the shares permanently?"
I asked Helen.
"Not automatically."
"Then why care about ninety days?"
"Control."
She turned the agreement toward me.
"Temporary voting rights would give him leverage during the transition. He could influence board appointments, merger approvals, asset sales, and litigation strategy."
"Long enough to steal the company?"
"Long enough to damage it. Long enough to negotiate. Long enough to hide things."
She tapped another section.
"And if the forged estate documents we've seen are part of a larger package, he may believe he can turn temporary control into something more permanent."
My father's company had survived recessions, lawsuits, a disastrous acquisition, and the collapse of print advertising.
The idea that Dererick had married me to gain a ninety-day foothold made me want to tear every photograph of our wedding off the walls.
Instead, Helen made me sit down and list every estate document I had signed since meeting him.
There were more than I remembered.
A revised will.
A healthcare directive.
A durable power of attorney I had later revoked.
Insurance updates.
Trust acknowledgments.
Dererick had always offered to organize paperwork for me.
He called it "taking something off my plate."
Now every helpful gesture looked different.
Kevin spent the afternoon comparing legitimate documents with the files from Dererick's archive.
At 6:18 p.m., he found a draft codicil I had never seen.
It increased Dererick's inheritance substantially.
My signature was missing.
Meredith's was not.
She had already signed as a witness to a document I had never executed.
"Maybe they planned to get your signature later," Kevin said.
"While I was drugged?"
He did not answer.
Helen did.
"Or by using your digital credentials again."
The thought made me sick.
I had spent years believing identity theft meant strangers stealing passwords.
I had never imagined the person sleeping beside me could steal my legal existence piece by piece.
That night, I stayed in a secure apartment owned by Helen's firm.
There were no photographs on the walls.
No familiar blankets.
No objects Dererick had touched.
It should have felt sterile.
Instead, it felt like the first room in days that belonged entirely to me.
At 11:06 p.m., someone slid an envelope beneath the door.
I heard the paper scrape across the floor.
I froze.
Ortiz had an officer stationed downstairs.
Nobody should have reached the hallway without being seen.
I called her before touching it.
Two officers searched the floor.
They found nobody.
The building camera showed a delivery worker exiting the elevator three minutes earlier.
He had worn a cap low over his face and left by the stairs.
Inside the envelope was a photograph of me asleep in my hotel room from two nights earlier.
Not my house.
The hotel.
My blood went cold.
Someone had been close enough to photograph me through the partially open curtains.
On the back, four words were written in black ink.
NINETY DAYS IS GENEROUS.
Below that was a date.
SATURDAY.
Three days away.
Ortiz arrived in person.
She read the note twice.
"Do you recognize the handwriting?"
"No."
"Could it be Dererick's?"
"Maybe if he disguised it."
"What happens Saturday?"
I thought through my calendar.
No board meeting.
No court hearing.
No family event.
Then I remembered.
"Our anniversary trip."
Helen looked at me.
"What trip?"
"Dererick booked a weekend at my family's lake house months ago."
Ortiz's face hardened.
"Where?"
"Two hours north."
"Remote?"
"Very."
The house sat on twenty acres of wooded land beside a private lake.
My father had bought it when I was a teenager.
Dererick loved it because there were no neighbors nearby.
I had once thought that was romantic.
Now I felt nauseated.
"Who knew you were going?"
Ortiz asked.
"Dererick. Meredith. My mother. My assistant. Probably my uncle."
"Was anything scheduled there?"
"Dinner. Hiking. Nothing important."
Then another memory surfaced.
The master bedroom at the lake house had been renovated the previous winter.
Dererick had chosen the paint.
A muted blue.
I looked at Ortiz.
"The bedroom is blue."
Nobody spoke.
Mara's words echoed in my mind.
Blue room.
The phrase had belonged to Hale's old clinic, but perhaps it had become something more.
A name for a stage.
A controlled environment.
A place prepared in advance.
"We search the lake house," Ortiz said.
"With a warrant?"
"Your family owns it."
"I do."
"Then you can consent."
We left before dawn.
I rode with Ortiz.
Two unmarked vehicles followed.
The farther we drove from the city, the more isolated the road became.
By the time the lake appeared through the trees, my hands were cold despite the heat in the car.
The house looked peaceful.
Gray stone.
Wide windows.
A dock extending into still water.
My father had taught me to swim there.
I had scattered part of his ashes beneath a maple tree near the shore.
Dererick had proposed renewing our vows there one day.
Now officers entered room by room.
The kitchen was clean.
The living room untouched.
The guest bedrooms empty.
Then we reached the master suite.
The lake house search affected me in ways I did not understand until we reached the bedroom.
My father had renovated that room himself when I was seventeen.
The old wallpaper had peeled in the summer humidity, and he let me choose the replacement color even though I chose something he hated.
Years later, after he died, Dererick suggested repainting it.
"Something calmer," he said.
He chose blue.
I had teased him for caring so much about paint.
Now the color looked like a signature.
The investigators moved carefully, photographing every angle before opening drawers.
I stood in the hallway while an evidence technician called out item numbers.
Camera one.
Camera two.
Printed image set.
Prepared luggage.
Handwriting sample.
The language was professional and flat.
That helped.
If anyone in the room had said, "Your husband prepared this for your death," I might have fallen apart.
Instead, they numbered things.
A number can be survived one at a time.
In the bathroom, a technician found a stack of hotel-sized toiletries identical to the brands I used.
In the dresser, someone had placed one of my old scarves.
In the nightstand, there was a paperback novel I had finished months earlier.
The room had been dressed to look inhabited by me.
Not merely visited by me.
If something happened there, anyone entering afterward would see a woman who had arrived willingly and settled in.
"He knows what I pack," I whispered.
Ortiz looked at the suitcase.
"Someone does."
That correction mattered.
We still did not know whether Dererick had prepared every object himself.
The network had multiple hands.
In the closet, I saw a shoebox with my name written on it.
Inside were photocopies of journal pages from the year my father died.
Real pages.
I had written about guilt, exhaustion, and wanting the pressure to stop.
One sentence had been highlighted.
I wish I could disappear for a while.
My stomach dropped.
Taken alone, it sounded ominous.
In the original journal, the next sentence was about taking a vacation to Maine.
The copy ended before that line.
"They cut context," I said.
Ortiz photographed the page.
"They curate context."
That was more accurate.
They did not invent every piece of the lie.
They selected real pieces and removed whatever made them harmless.
My grief.
My fatigue.
My dependence on people I loved.
All of it had been real.
They had simply rearranged reality until it pointed somewhere false.
I thought of the fake note in my suitcase.
I don't want to be a burden anymore.
The phrase came from a conversation with my mother, transformed into a farewell message.
For the first time, I understood the purpose of the entire archive.
They were not creating a fictional Anna from nothing.
They were building a counterfeit version from stolen pieces of the real one.
That version could survive me because it looked familiar to everyone who knew me.
Standing in the blue bedroom, I finally understood why the deadline mattered emotionally as well as financially.
Saturday had been our anniversary weekend.
If I died there, the last public story about us would have been romance.
A devoted husband taking his struggling wife away to rest.
Even the location had been chosen to reinforce him.
My father's lake house.
Our anniversary.
My favorite wine.
A place full of memories other people would describe as happy.
The scene had been designed before anyone entered it.
The blue walls seemed darker than I remembered.
A new camera had been installed in a ceiling vent.
A second was hidden inside a digital clock.
A locked cabinet contained blank evidence bags, disposable gloves, and printed photographs of me from previous nights.
No sedatives were found.
No obvious weapon.
Nothing that by itself explained Saturday.
Then an officer opened the closet.
A suitcase sat inside.
My suitcase.
I had not packed it.
Inside were clothes arranged for a weekend trip.
My sweaters.
My jeans.
My toiletries.
A bottle of wine I liked.
At the bottom was a handwritten note in what looked like my handwriting.
I'M SORRY.
I DON'T WANT TO BE A BURDEN ANYMORE.
I stared at it until the letters blurred.
"That's not mine."
Ortiz placed a hand on my shoulder.
"Don't touch it."
A technician photographed the page.
Then he lifted the suitcase lining.
Beneath it was the small piece of fabric Dererick had cut from my pajama top three nights earlier.
Sealed in the same plastic bag.
The evidence he had taken from our bedroom was already here.
May you like
Saturday was not the beginning of the plan.
Saturday was supposed to be the end.
