Chapter 3 - NINE DAYS AFTER REBECCA
We escaped the university through a service entrance after Sophie convinced a security officer to hold the hallway.
Nobody spoke during the drive to my house.
I had lived in that little brick place for sixteen years, long enough for its floors to remember the girls' running footsteps.
Now even the familiar porch seemed foreign.
Inside, Lily locked the deadbolt, and Sophie drew the curtains.
Emma set a kettle on the stove because comforting people was what she did when she didn't know how to help.
“Start at the beginning,” I said.
Lily laid out a timeline across our kitchen table.
“Three months ago, I requested Rebecca's original medical records for a family history project.”
“Why didn't you ask me?”
“Because I knew you'd tell me the hospital had closed.”
It had.
The small private clinic where Rebecca had been treated had shut down two years after her death.
“But a storage contractor still had copies,” Lily continued.
“The records showed she was discharged alive on the date we were told she died.”
A cup rattled in Emma's hand.
I stared at the page.
“That has to be a mistake.”
“We thought so too,” Emma said.
“Sophie found a nurse who remembered Rebecca.”
“Her name is Nora Hale,” Sophie added.
“She said Rebecca asked for help, not treatment.”
I remembered a telephone call made nine days before the babies arrived.
Daniel had said Rebecca was terribly ill and that doctors could do nothing.
His voice had sounded like a man speaking underwater.
“The death certificate?” I asked.
Lily slid another paper toward me.
It bore an official seal and a physician's signature, but the underlying registration number belonged to another woman.
I felt physically sick.
“Who would do something like that?”
Sophie reached for the flash drive.
“Someone with a reason to make her disappear.”
Our laptop made a soft clicking noise as the device opened.
There were three folders: PAYMENTS, RECORDINGS, and REBECCA.
Inside the last folder was a video file dated five months after her supposed death.
Emma gripped my hand.
On the screen, Rebecca stood in a bare room beside a window crossed with iron bars.
She was thin, pale, and very much alive.
She leaned toward the camera.
“Emily,” she said, “if you ever see this, keep my daughters away from Arthur Vale.”
May you like
Then someone pounded on the locked door behind her.
