Chương 2
My throat tightened.
For years, Rebecca and I had been enemies because of a workplace dispute that neither of us had ever bothered to repair.
Three years ago, she had lost a director position she believed she deserved.
She blamed me because I had discovered mistakes in one of her inventory reports.
I had never reported her directly.
I had only followed company procedure.
But procedure did not matter when someone's career was collapsing.
She believed I had ruined her.
I believed she had spent years trying to ruin me back.
Now she was standing beside me while my husband was somewhere outside planning my death.
"How did you open the freezer?" I asked.
Rebecca looked at the emergency tools in her hand.
"I didn't."
Her answer made my stomach drop.
"What?"
"The lock was not broken."
She swallowed.
"Someone disabled the outside release."
I stared at the door behind us.
A strange feeling moved through me.
Not fear.
Not exactly.
Something worse.
A feeling that I had been living inside a lie for longer than one night.
Rebecca crouched beside me.
"Clara, there is something you need to know."
I looked at her.
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her phone.
The screen was cracked.
There was a recording open.
"I found this before I came here."
My hands shook as I took the phone.
The audio was quiet.
Muffled.
But I recognized Victor's voice immediately.
"You just need to make sure she is inside when the system resets."
A second voice answered.
A voice I did not recognize.
"What if she gets suspicious?"
Victor laughed softly.
"She won't."
I stopped breathing.
The recording continued.
"Clara trusts people too much."
Rebecca took the phone back before I dropped it.
"He was not planning an accident."
The warehouse suddenly felt enormous.
Every sound seemed distant.
The alarms.
The machines.
The wind hitting the walls.
My husband had not lost control.
He had not made a terrible mistake.
He had planned every second.
A contraction ripped through me so sharply that my knees almost gave out.
Rebecca caught me before I hit the floor.
"Clara."
I gripped her arm.
"My babies."
Her expression hardened.
"Then we get you out of here."
For the first time in years, Rebecca Hale and I wanted the same thing.
We both wanted Victor to fail.
For the first time in years, Rebecca Hale and I wanted the same thing.
We both wanted Victor to fail.
The thought should have comforted me.
Instead, it made my chest ache because I was beginning to understand how much of my life had been built on trust I had never questioned.
Rebecca helped me sit on a wooden bench near the loading area while she called emergency services.
Her fingers moved quickly across the phone screen, but she kept looking at me between each sentence she typed.
"You need to stay awake," she said.
"I am awake."
"You are doing that thing where you pretend you are fine."
I frowned.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you become polite when you are terrified."
I almost laughed.
Almost.
Because she was right.
Even when I was falling apart, I had always worried about making other people uncomfortable.
It was one of the reasons Victor loved me at first.
Or at least, it was one of the reasons he said he loved me.
"You still hate me, don't you?" I asked.
Rebecca looked surprised.
"What?"
"You spent three years acting like I destroyed your career."
She looked down at the cracked phone in her hand.
"I was angry."
"That wasn't my question."
The warehouse became quiet between us.
Not truly quiet.
There were still alarms.
Still machines running.
Still footsteps somewhere beyond the loading doors.
But the space between two people who have spent years misunderstanding each other has its own kind of silence.
"No," she finally said.
"I don't hate you anymore."
I watched her face carefully.
I was too exhausted to pretend I believed her immediately.
"Why?"
She gave a tired smile that disappeared almost instantly.
"Because I found out I was wrong."
That answer bothered me more than a complicated one would have.
People rarely admitted they were wrong.
Not completely.
Not after years.
"What changed?"
Rebecca leaned against the table beside me.
"A month ago, I found an old audit report."
My stomach tightened.
"About me?"
"About Victor."
The name felt poisonous now.
"He had been moving money through different accounts connected to the company."
I stared at her.
"Victor doesn't work for my company."
"No."
She looked at me.
"But he studied how your company worked because of you."
I felt a strange coldness that had nothing to do with the freezer.
"Why?"
"Because he knew your position gave you access to information."
My hands moved protectively over my stomach.
"I don't understand."
"Neither did I at first."
Rebecca glanced toward the dark warehouse offices.
"Victor was not just drowning in debt."
She lowered her voice.
"He was hiding it."
I swallowed.
"How much?"
"Enough that selling everything he owned would not save him."
The answer sat heavily in my mind.
I thought about the expensive dinners.
The renovated kitchen.
The vacations he insisted we could afford.
The way he always told me not to worry about money.
Suddenly, all those moments looked different.
Not fake exactly.
Something worse.
Carefully arranged.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Rebecca looked away.
"Because I wasn't sure."
That angered me.
"You knew something was wrong."
"I suspected something was wrong."
"There is a difference?"
"Yes."
Her voice sharpened.
A small piece of the old Rebecca returned.
"The difference is that suspicion can destroy someone's life."
I looked at her.
She continued.
"I spent three years believing you ruined mine because I wanted someone to blame."
Her expression softened.
"I was not going to do the same thing to you without proof."
May you like
A paramedic finally entered through the side door with two firefighters behind him.
The sudden movement made both of us look up.
