CHAPTER 4

ZANE

After a long day at work, I met Pete in my home office for a debriefing, where he went over the day’s events, and gave me his observations. He was telling me about Lori’s day and the car ride to school, when he leaned back with an expression I knew all too well.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know, boss.” He rubbed his jaw. “There’s just something about her. She seems very guarded, yet skittish at the same time. She flinches when a door shuts, and she’s hyper aware of her surroundings. I think maybe she observes… too much.”

I couldn’t disagree with him. I also had my suspicions about her.

“Keep an eye on her,” I said. “Don’t make it obvious.”

“Always.” He stood, gathering his tablet, and paused at the door. “Lori liked her, though. A lot. She talked about comic books the whole way to school. Wouldn’t stop, actually.”

That stopped me for a second. “Lori doesn’t like to talk to anyone in the car.”

“She did today.” Pete shrugged, like it wasn’t his job to have an opinion on it, and left me alone with the thought sitting heavy in my chest.

I poured myself two fingers of scotch I didn’t really want and pulled up the security feed on my laptop, cycling through the day. There was something almost clinical about watching your own house like this — rooms rendered in grainy black and white, your daughter’s whole day reduced to timestamps and motion-triggered clips. I told myself I was doing my due diligence by vetting the new hire. That was all.

I watched Serena help Lori with her ballet shoes after pickup from school, kneeling on the floor while Lori chattered at her, more animated than I’d seen her in months. I watched them at the kitchen island afterward, heads bent together over something — a comic book, I realized, the same one Pete mentioned, its pages worn soft. Lori was laughing, and it wasn’t the polite shy laugh she gave visitors, but the real one, the one I only ever heard late at night when I let myself be silly with her for twenty minutes before bed.

Lori didn’t warm to people easily. And here was a woman she’d known for less than twenty-four hours, and she’d already handed her the thing she loved most in the world like it was nothing.

I didn’t know what to do with that. It lodged itself in my chest next to all the other things I didn’t know what to do with.

I closed the laptop and opened the bottom drawer of my desk instead. The photograph was exactly where it always was, face down beneath old contracts.

Sophia. The love of my life.

I turned it over and let myself look at her for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit. God, I’d loved her. I’d loved her in a way that had scared me at the time. I used to think we’d grow old on the stupid, oversized property we’d bought and built together, that Lori would have a dozen more siblings running through these halls, that I’d die in that house, an old man surrounded by all of it. But none of that had lasted. After she’d left, I sold the house and moved from Los Angeles all the way to Dallas with my baby, desperate to heal from it all.

I didn’t get my happy-ever-after. Instead I got a cold bed and a four-year-old case file with no leads and a daughter who used to ask where her mother was until she finally, mercifully, stopped asking.

I ran my thumb along the edge of the photograph, over the curve of her jaw, and felt the old fury climb up through the grief like it always did, twisting until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. How could she just leave? Get up in the middle of the night and vanish, no note, no goodbye, nothing — and leave me holding a one-year-old and four years of unanswered questions? I used to lie awake constructing reasons that made it make sense. Anything that meant she hadn’t simply chosen to walk away from us.

And then a woman walks into a cafe wearing her face.

I set the photograph down and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I was not a man who believed in doppelgängers. I ran a company that required me to deal exclusively in facts, in verifiable things, in paper trails that either held up or didn’t. So I’d done what I always did. I’d had her checked.

Serena Sterling. She’d been born in Melbourne, she had a mother and a younger sister, both confirmed, and both matching her story detail for detail. I’d even gone as far as talking to people in the area, and everyone’s stories added up. She had an Australian accent that didn’t waver. Except for her face, she was so different from Sophia. Sophia had been an orphan. She had no mother or sister, no family to speak of beyond the one we’d built ourselves, and she’d certainly never set foot in Australia in her life — I would have known.

Serena’s story matched with the investigation I’d done. It should have been enough to put the whole thing to rest.

But it hadn’t.

Because facts didn’t explain her face. Facts didn’t explain why my daughter had looked at this stranger across a kitchen island and decided, within an hour, that she was safe. Facts didn’t explain the way something in my own chest had lurched sideways the moment Serena Sterling walked into that cafe, before I’d even fully processed what I was looking at.

I’d given her the job because I needed to find answers. I was starting to think I might not survive whatever those answers turned out to be.

My phone buzzed against the desk. Gia.

I looked at her name for a long moment, thumb hovering, and then turned the screen face down without answering. Gia had been calling more often lately, and I knew what most of those calls were really about, underneath the excuse of the fancy parties or whatever she’d decided justified it this time. She’d loved me since we were sixteen years old. I cared about her deeply, I’d known her since we were in diapers, but I didn’t love her the way she loved me. To me, she was more like a sister than anything else.

Gia was the reason Sophia and I had even that fight four years ago. She’d walked in to catch Gia and I in a kiss, right as I was pushing Gia off. I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t what it looked like. I wasn’t actually kissing Gia, she’d unexpectedly kissed me and I pushed her off immediately, but Sophia knew how Gia felt about me, and it must have really hurt her. I still didn’t know, four years later, whether that fight was the reason she left, or just the last thing that happened before whatever actually took her.

I let the phone buzz itself into silence and pulled the laptop back toward me, flipping to Serena’s room, watching her through the camera she’d tried to find yesterday.

She was getting into bed. I watched her settle under the covers, reach up to switch off the lamp, and then lift the edge of her pillow and slide her hand beneath it, checking to make sure whatever she kept under there was exactly where she’d left it.

I already knew what it was. I knew she had a knife, and it was one more thing that made me suspicious of her.

Nannies didn’t sleep with knives under their pillows.

I sat there in the dark of my office long after the feed cut to the next clip, the photograph of my wife still face-up on the desk beside my laptop, and thought that I had never in my life wanted two things to be true at once as badly as I wanted Serena Sterling to be exactly who she said she was — and to be lying to me about every single word of it.