Chapter 4 - THE ONE-WAY TICKET
“Belize?”
The word slipped from Caroline’s lips like a dying breath. She stared at the boarding pass in Mrs. Bennett’s hand, then slowly turned her tear-streaked face toward the man she had planned to marry.
“Owen, we’re supposed to go to Florida on Tuesday,” Caroline whispered, her voice cracking. “For Maya’s seventh birthday. We paid the deposit on the beach house.”
Owen didn't look at her. His eyes were fixed on the exit doors, calculating the distance, measuring his chances of simply bolting into the night.
“There is no beach house, Caroline,” David from finance said, his fingers flying across his company tablet. “I’m looking at the corporate credit card flags right now. He booked this one-way ticket to Belize yesterday morning. Just one ticket.”
He was abandoning them. All of them. Me, the wife he tried to bury alive. Caroline, the woman he manipulated into raising his secret child. And Maya, his own flesh and blood.
I looked at Maya, who was clinging to Caroline’s skirt, her small face buried in the fabric. She was the only innocent one in this entire nightmare.
“You were going to leave her?” I asked, my voice rising in a mix of horror and rage. “You used my ‘death’ to dump your child on a preschool teacher, collected half a million dollars in life insurance, and you were just going to vanish?”
“I had to!” Owen snapped, the mask completely off now. His face was twisted in a desperate, ugly snarl. “You don't understand, Lydia! The life insurance wasn't enough! I owe people money. Bad people. The gambling debts from the offshore accounts—they were going to break my legs, or worse!”
He pointed a trembling finger at me. “If you had just died in that hospital like you were supposed to, everything would have been fine! I would have paid them off, and Maya and I could have started over!”
A disgusted murmur ripped through the crowd. Several men from the sales team stepped forward, subtly blocking the main exit doors.
Caroline slowly stood up. She looked at Owen with a revulsion so deep it seemed to age her ten years in a single moment.
“You told me this was your grandmother’s,” Caroline said, her voice eerily calm. She reached over to her left wrist and unclasped a heavy, intricate silver bracelet.
My breath hitched.
It was an antique silver filigree bracelet. My grandfather had bought it for my grandmother in Rome in 1952. I had worn it every single day of my adult life, right up until the paramedics cut my clothes off in the ambulance.
Caroline walked over to me. She didn't hand it to me; she gently took my wrist and clasped the cool silver around it, right where it belonged.
“I’m so sorry,” Caroline whispered to me, her eyes meeting mine. In that brief exchange, a silent, powerful alliance was forged. We were two women whose lives had been hijacked by the same monster.
“Keep the damn bracelet,” Owen spat, taking a step backward toward the kitchen doors. “I’m leaving. None of you can stop me. The police aren't here, and this is a civil matter.”
“Actually, Owen, it’s not,” Mrs. Bennett said. The retired founder of the company stepped into the center of the aisle, her posture rigid, her presence commanding the entire room.
She turned to David. “David, the forty-three thousand dollars the employees raised for Lydia’s ‘funeral’ and Caroline’s support. Where did it actually go?”
David tapped his screen. “It was routed into a shell LLC. But ma’am… that’s not the worst of it. The corporate audit software just flagged a matching LLC in the company’s pension ledger. He hasn't just been stealing GoFundMe money.”
David looked up, his face pale. “He’s been draining the employee pension fund for three years. He’s stolen over two million dollars.”
Pandemonium erupted. People shouted, chairs scraped against the floor. Men and women who had worked alongside Owen, who had trusted him with their retirement, surged forward angrily.
Owen panicked. He backed up against a serving station, grabbing a heavy silver serving tray as if he might use it as a weapon.
“Don't act so righteous!” Owen screamed over the crowd, pointing the tray directly at my sister, Rachel.
Rachel froze, her hand tightening on my shoulder.
Owen laughed, a hysterical, broken sound. “You all think I’m the devil? Ask the loving sister! Ask Rachel where she got the money to keep you in that fancy private rehab clinic for the last six months!”
The ballroom fell dead silent again.
I turned to look at my sister. Rachel’s face was the color of chalk.
“Rachel?” I asked, a new, terrible dread pooling in my stomach.
Owen sneered, his eyes wild with desperate malice. “Tell her, Rachel. Tell your precious sister who paid the ten-thousand-dollar-a-month clinic bills to keep her locked away and quiet while I played the grieving widower.”
Rachel opened her mouth, but only a dry sob came out. She dropped her hand from my shoulder, stepping back as if she had been burned.
May you like
From inside her designer handbag, a heavy object slipped out, hitting the hardwood floor with a metallic clatter.
It was a gold Rolex watch.
