Chapter 15 - The Lowest Room

I had imagined meeting my father for almost my entire life.

I had never imagined holding an affidavit that accused him of destroying my mother's work.

Rowan admitted he had removed a set of originals seventeen years earlier.

He insisted he did it to keep the information away from officials who were using Eleanor's investigation to locate vulnerable witnesses.

He had not destroyed them, he said.

He had hidden them.

But he let my mother believe the evidence was gone, and she continued asking questions alone.

“Did you know what would happen to her?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you know she was in danger?”

“Yes.”

I looked away.

He had chosen for her.

Richard had done the same in a thousand smaller cruelties.

Two men who despised each other had agreed that a woman's safety could be managed without telling her the truth.

I wanted nothing from either of them.

At work, the hearing deadline approached while our clean evidence reconstruction ran slowly.

Ana remained missing.

Tyler remained missing.

Richard's legal team petitioned to block portions of the financial inquiry.

A judge required tighter definitions and additional documentary support.

It was not a defeat of the investigation.

It felt like one.

I went home for the first time in days and opened the box of my mother's belongings.

A blue ribbon.

A library card.

A receipt from a repair shop.

I laid them out on the kitchen table like pieces of a life I'd spent too long trying to solve.

At the bottom was a note in my own childish handwriting.

MOM SAYS THE SECOND DOOR IS FOR TELLING THE TRUTH.

I had written it when I was eight.

A memory returned in fragments.

My mother leading me into a room painted blue.

A narrow cabinet behind a bookcase.

Her fingers guiding mine over a hidden latch.

Not the annex basement.

Not the church parking lot.

The blue room in our old family home.

Richard had renovated that house after she died.

He told everyone it was because the memories hurt him.

I picked up the telephone.

“Vance, I know where the other door is.”

He asked for the address.

I gave him the house where Richard had raised me.

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