Chapter 5 - The Archive
The lab results came back two days later. A harmful compound was present in my blood — the same class of compound found in residue from my facial serum and one of the supplement bottles Marcus kept in our kitchen. Not enough to pinpoint exactly how long he'd been dosing me. Enough to prove I hadn't imagined a single symptom.
I sat in a hospital consultation room while a doctor explained the possible long-term effects. Caleb sat beside me. Standing. I still wasn't used to it.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked suddenly. He understood I wasn't talking about Marcus.
"My legs?"
"Yes."
He leaned back. "Because every time I got close to telling you, something happened. A Calloway account got breached. A source disappeared. One investigator got threatened. I convinced myself that staying harmless kept us both alive."
"For fourteen years."
"Yes."
"You let me mourn a version of you that wasn't real."
His face tightened. "I know."
"I understand why," I said. "That doesn't mean I forgive it yet."
"Fair," he said, and then, almost smiling, "Progress."
"Don't push it."
Investigators eventually released Isabelle pending the financial inquiry — she hadn't touched the vehicle, though the transfer scheme was easy enough to trace back to her. Her knowledge of the river was harder to pin down.
She called me over and over. I ignored her. Then she sent one message.
I can prove what happened to Mom and Dad.
Caleb thought it was manipulation. I agreed. That didn't mean it was a lie.
Isabelle wanted immunity. What she had was the location of a private archive Marcus's father kept attached to a riverfront club outside Ashford Bend — not files labeled evidence, just ordinary business records. Old payment ledgers. Contractor names. Vehicle maintenance invoices. Nothing, alone. Everything, together.
She knew because Marcus had taken her there himself.
"Why help us now?" I asked, once we finally met through attorneys.
Isabelle looked exhausted — pregnancy or fear, I couldn't tell which anymore. "Because Marcus told me I was next. After the bank fell apart, he blamed me. Said I talked too much. Said his father could make people disappear."
I felt no sympathy at first. "You watched me sink."
She started crying. "I thought you'd get out."
"You watched him leave me."
"He said the restraint would release."
"It didn't."
"I didn't know that."
"You smiled."
Her face collapsed. That detail mattered to her. Good.
"I was scared," she said.
"No. You were standing safely on the shore. I was the one underwater."
She lowered her head. "The baby is his."
"I know."
"He promised we'd leave Ashford Bend after the transaction went through."
"I know enough."
"I hated you," she said, and that surprised me more than any apology could have.
"Why?"
"Because you got everything. Dad. Caleb. Calloway Holdings. People treated you like the real daughter, and me like the woman his second wife brought into the house."
"You were twelve," I said.
"I helped raise you."
"I know."
"You could have told me how it felt."
"I wanted your life," she said. "So I tried to take it."
She had no answer to that, and neither did I.
Isabelle eventually handed investigators access to the private archive. No trap needed — search warrants did the rest. The documents connected Marcus's father to shell companies that had paid a mechanic shortly before our parents' fatal crash. That same mechanic was still alive. Faced with the financial records and old photographs, he cooperated. He admitted the steering system on my parents' car had been deliberately compromised. He claimed he'd only been told it was meant to intimidate, not kill.
May you like
Nobody believed him.
Caleb had been right for fourteen years. Our parents hadn't simply died on a bad mountain road. Someone had arranged it. And my brother had spent nearly half his life pretending he couldn't stand, because standing openly once had nearly gotten him killed.
