Chapter 2
I dropped the hammer.
For a second, the room tilted around me.
Lily grabbed my hand.
“Daddy, who is that?”
Vanessa yanked against my grip.
“Daniel, she’s lying. It’s a recording. It’s some sick trick.”
The voice came again from behind the metal door.
“Please... help me.”
My knees almost buckled.
“Claire?”
The banging stopped.
Then the voice broke.
“You remember me.”
I could not breathe.
Claire had died in a car accident outside Seattle.
I had stood beside a closed coffin.
I had held Lily while she asked why Mommy would not wake up.
Vanessa began crying, but there were no tears.
“Daniel, you need to think. Someone is trying to destroy us.”
I looked at the lock.
It was bolted with a steel bar and a keypad.
“What’s the code?”
Vanessa shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
I grabbed her shoulders.
“What is the code?”
Lily screamed, “Daddy!”
I let go.
I was shaking so hard my hands did not feel like mine.
I called 911 and put the phone on speaker.
“My name is Daniel Whitmore. I need police and fire rescue at my home in Bellevue. There is a locked metal door hidden behind a wall, and someone is trapped inside.”
Vanessa whispered, “You just ruined everything.”
I stared at her.
“What everything?”
She said nothing.
The dispatcher asked if anyone was hurt.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to open it.”
I found a crowbar in the toolbox and jammed it under the steel bar.
The metal groaned.
Inside, Claire cried my name again.
Lily covered her ears and sobbed.
“I knew it,” she kept saying. “I knew the lady was real.”
I turned.
“What lady?”
Vanessa shouted, “She has nightmares!”
Lily pointed at Vanessa.
“She told me Mommy was bad. She told me the woman behind the wall would take me away if I talked.”
I felt something inside me crack.
For months, Lily had woken up screaming.
Vanessa said it was grief.
She said Lily needed stricter discipline.
She said I was letting my daughter live in fantasy.
I had believed my wife.
I had doubted my child.
I swung the hammer against the keypad until plastic shattered.
The lock sparked.
The steel bar loosened.
Sirens sounded outside.
Vanessa tried to run.
I caught her before she reached the stairs.
She slapped at my chest.
“You don’t understand what she did to me!”
“Who?”
Vanessa’s face twisted.
“Claire.”
Firefighters rushed in with police behind them.
They cut through the lock while I held Lily in the hallway.
The door opened with a shriek.
A woman collapsed forward into a firefighter’s arms.
Thin.
Pale.
Hair cut short.
Wrists bruised from restraints.
But her eyes were the same.
Claire looked straight at Lily.
“My baby.”
Lily let out a sound I had never heard before and ran to her.
I tried to move.
I could not.
Claire wrapped trembling arms around our daughter.
Then she looked at me.
“Daniel,” she whispered. “Vanessa was never your wife’s friend.”
Police turned toward Vanessa.
She lifted both hands.
“She kidnapped me first.”
May you like
Claire shook her head weakly.
“No,” she said. “She stole my life.”
