wasn’t sleepy.”
He turned to her. “What?”
Nora swallowed. Her eyes moved toward Elise and then away. “She said Mommy was crying.”
The room seemed to narrow. The air thinned.
Claire’s death had been ruled an accident. Wet roads. Low visibility. Driver fatigue. The SUV going through a barrier and into the reservoir. Nora, six months younger and strapped into the back seat, had survived with bruises, stitches, and long blank stretches where her memory simply dissolved. The doctors called it trauma. The investigators called it tragic. Everyone told Owen not to ask too much of a child who had nearly drowned.
So he hadn’t.
He had tried to protect what remained of her.
Now he looked at Elise, and for the first time, she looked truly afraid.
He called for Marta, the housekeeper, and when she appeared in the doorway, her expression was already wet with guilt. She had known something. Maybe not everything, but enough to recognize danger. Enough to have been waiting.
“Marta,” he said, forcing calm into his voice, “take Nora to my study. Stay with her. Don’t let anyone in unless it’s me.”
Nora clung to him. “Daddy, no.”
He crouched and took her face gently in both hands. “You are safe. You stay with Marta for two minutes. Two. Then I’m coming.”
She searched his face, then nodded.
Once she was gone, Elise’s composure splintered.
“You are indulging a disturbed child,” she said. “This is exactly why she has become impossible. She senses your weakness.”
Owen reached into his pocket, took out his phone, and started recording. He placed it on the table between them. “Say that again.”
Elise’s eyes dropped to the screen. “You think that’s clever?”
“No,” he said. “I think you’ve been careful for a long time.”
She folded her arms again, but the movement looked defensive now rather than elegant. “You’re emotional because she mentioned Claire. That’s not proof of anything.”
“How do you know Claire was crying?”
That landed.
A clean hit.
Elise’s lips parted. Nothing came out.
Owen stepped closer. “Nora never said Claire was crying. She said you said it. So I’ll ask once. How do you know?”
Elise turned away first, toward the darkened window over the sink. Rain streaked the glass. Her reflection looked warped, stretched thin. “You’re obsessed with a dead woman,” she said quietly. “This whole house is a shrine to someone who left you.”
“She died.”
“She left anyway.”
It was such a strange, ugly sentence that he almost missed the footsteps in the hall. Marta appeared at the doorway again, pale. “Mr. Hartley,” she said, “Detective Serrano is here.”
Owen blinked. “Lena?”
Claire’s younger sister stepped into the room seconds later, rain shining on the shoulders of her dark coat. She had the same gray eyes Claire used to get when she was angry, but the softness was gone. Owen had not spoken to her in months except through clipped texts about birthdays and school events. She never liked Elise. He had assumed it was grief, possessiveness, suspicion born from loss.
Now he was no longer certain of anything.
“I came because Marta called,” Lena said. Then her gaze moved to Elise, then to the phone on the table, and sharpened. “But I also came because I finally got something I’ve
