Chapter 14 - Lily’s Secret
I did not ask Lily.
Not immediately.
Maya did.
Carefully.
No pressure.
No leading questions.
They played with dolls for half an hour.
Then Maya placed a drawing of a flash drive on the table.
Lily looked at it.
Her face changed.
Maya said.
“Do you know what this is?”
Lily nodded.
“Did you see one at home?”
Another nod.
“Do you know where it is?”
Lily looked toward the observation window.
I was behind it.
Then she whispered.
“Rabbit.”
My heart jumped.
The stuffed rabbit.
Not the hospital one.
Her favorite rabbit at home.
A white stuffed rabbit named Junie.
We had retrieved it from the house.
It was inside a box at the secure apartment.
I found Junie.
The stitching along the back looked uneven.
I remembered fixing it once after Lily tore the seam.
Now there was a second stitch.
Caleb opened it in evidence conditions.
Inside was a tiny encrypted flash drive.
Lily had hidden it herself.
I knelt beside her.
“How did you know to hide it?”
She whispered.
“Daddy yelled.”
“About the drive?”
She nodded.
“Vanessa said find it.”
Lily had seen Grant hide it inside his desk.
Later, when he was gone, she took it.
“Why?”
Her answer broke my heart.
“Because bad.”
She had no idea what was on it.
She only knew the adults hurting her desperately wanted it.
Caleb decrypted the files.
The drive contained years of Grant’s private records.
Offshore transfers.
North Star payments.
Messages with Conrad.
Messages with Vanessa.
And one recording.
Grant and Conrad.
Conrad said.
“Your wife is becoming a liability.”
Grant answered.
“She doesn’t know anything.”
“She investigates money for a living.”
“She investigates other people.”
Conrad laughed.
“Until she doesn’t.”
Then Grant said.
“I can manage Evelyn.”
Conrad answered.
“If you could manage her, you wouldn’t be asking me how to hide six million dollars.”
Six million.
Far more than investigators knew.
Then Grant said.
“Once she’s gone, I can clean everything.”
There was a pause.
Conrad asked.
“Gone where?”
Grant answered.
“I don’t care.”
That sentence would follow me for years.
Not because it proved he wanted me dead.
It did not.
May you like
Because it proved something simpler.
By then, my husband did not care what happened to me as long as I stopped being a problem.
