Chapter 8: The Other Woman Calls
Officer Alvarez was still in the hallway when my phone rang.
The unknown number.
I answered it.
"Lauren." The voice was quiet.
A woman's voice — steady, but with something underneath it, the way a table sounds steady until you notice one leg is slightly shorter than the others.
"My name is Vanessa."
I didn't say anything.
"I know this isn't — I know there's no version of this call that's easy.
I just need you to know that I didn't know about Brooke.
Not until three months ago.
And I didn't know about the loan until tonight."
"But you knew about me," I said.
A pause.
"Yes."
"For four years."
"Yes."
I walked to the window.
The backyard was lit up.
The pool light was still on, blue and rippling, empty now.
"You sent someone to photograph me," I said.
"I did." She didn't soften it.
"I needed to know if you were real.
I'd told myself a lot of things and I needed to see that you were a real person who lived a real life.
I'm not asking you to understand that.
I'm just telling you it's true."
"Did seeing me help?"
Another pause, longer.
"No.
It made it worse.
It made everything worse."
Outside, Ethan's shadow crossed the kitchen window.
He was still on the phone.
His arm moved in a way that meant he was frustrated — the same gesture I'd watched for eleven years.
"He bought you a ticket," I said.
"I know."
"Were you going to go?"
"I was at the airport," she said.
"I had my bag.
I was at the gate." Her voice didn't shake.
"And then I watched the security alert come through on the neighborhood app.
214 Willow Creek Lane.
And I knew exactly what had happened.
And I knew what he would do next — he'd find a way out of it, he always does, and he'd call me in two days and tell me we needed to wait a little longer.
He's been telling me to wait a little longer for two years."
"So you decided to burn it down instead."
"I decided to make sure you had what you needed," she said.
"You deserved to know before his brother got there and made things disappear."
I sat down on the edge of the bed in the spare room, where I'd wandered without noticing.
"Why didn't you just leave?" I said.
"Tonight.
Without texting me.
You had a ticket.
You could have just walked away."
Silence.
"Because I saw your face on that security alert map," she said finally.
"Your name.
Your address.
And I thought about that photograph from the parking garage, and I thought about who I'd been for four years — and I didn't want to be that person for one more hour."
The line was quiet for a moment.
"There's a storage unit," she said.
"On Brennan Road.
Unit 14.
The key is on his physical keychain — the one that's at the bottom of your pool.
The unit has physical copies of everything.
Printed statements.
The original lease.
Two years of wire transfer receipts.
And a letter he wrote to Marcus about restructuring the Crestline assets into a new entity before the divorce."
"Before the divorce," I said.
"He's been planning it for eight months," she said.
"He just — he kept delaying.
I don't know why."
I thought I knew why.
Because leaving is easy to plan and hard to do.
Because even people who build secret lives still flinch at the moment of actual destruction.
"Are you going to be all right?" I said.
And then I was surprised I'd said it, and I think she was too.
"I don't know yet," Vanessa said.
"Are you?"
"I don't know yet either."
I heard her exhale — not quite a laugh, not quite a cry.
"The storage unit," she said again.
"Don't let Marcus get there first."
She hung up.
I sat with the phone in my hands for a moment.
Then I walked back to the home office, where Daniel was still sitting in the corner chair, and I told him everything she'd said.
May you like
Every word.
He was already reaching for his own phone before I finished.
