Chapter 3 - The Sister’s Ledger
“Explain yourself,” I commanded, stepping further into the cramped storage unit, the space feeling suffocatingly small with her presence filling it. “You lied about your name. You concealed your familial ties to a federal prosecutor who spent half a decade trying to put me behind bars. And you infiltrated my home under false pretenses.”
Hannah crossed her arms over her faded denim jacket, her amber eyes locking onto mine with an unblinking intensity that made it difficult to maintain my aggressive posture.
“Infiltrated?” She shook her head, a bitter smile touching her lips. “Please, Mr. Lawson. Your security team is a joke if a woman with a backpack and a love for housekeeping can ‘infiltrate’ your fortress. I applied for that job because Mrs. Ramirez is my aunt. She’s the one who called me six months after Emily died and told me what was happening to those little girls.”
“Emily didn't have any surviving family close by,” I spat back. “She was an only child from Austin.”
“She wasn't close with my sister Evelyn, no,” Hannah agreed calmly. “Evelyn and I had different mothers, and our paths diverged significantly when she went to law school and I went into clinical pediatric psychology. But Emily and I… Emily and I met at a grief support retreat in Marfa three years before she got sick. We kept in touch. Secretly.”
The room seemed to drop ten degrees.
“Secretly?” I repeated, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. “My wife didn't keep secrets from me.”
“Your wife kept every single part of her soul hidden from you because you were too busy building a hotel empire to notice she was drowning,” Hannah fired back, her voice rising, losing its professional polish and cracking with genuine, visceral anger.
I flinched as if I’d been struck. No one spoke to Lawson Mercer that way. Not board members, not federal agents, not my own high-priced attorneys.
“Watch your tone,” I warned, taking a step toward her.
“Or what?” Hannah challenged, stepping right back up to me, standing so close I could smell the faint scent of rain and chamomile tea on her skin. “You’ll fire me again? You’ll throw me out into the street? Go ahead. I’m already gone. But before you lock me up or sic your security goons on me, you need to look at what’s inside Box 404.”
She pointed a trembling finger toward an open cardboard box near my boots.
I looked down. Inside sat a stack of spiral-bound notebooks with Emily’s handwriting scrawled across the covers.
May you like
“What is this?” I asked, my voice suddenly losing its dangerous edge, replaced by a cold, sickening dread.
“That,” Hannah whispered, her anger suddenly collapsing into profound, crushing sorrow, “is the journal Emily kept during the last two years of her life. The years you spent flying between Chicago, New York, and Atlanta expanding your portfolio while she sat in that mausoleum of a mansion realizing her husband was becoming a ghost.”
