HER HUSBAND... CHAPTER THREE - by Khadijah Mohammed

I don't know how long I sat there before I called them. "Vanessa. Corey. Come here." My voice sounded strange even to me, too calm for what I was about to show them. They found me still on the floor of the closet, the bag open beside me, stacks of it fanned out like something from a film neither of them would believe if they saw it on a screen. Vanessa's mouth opened and nothing came out. Corey just stared, his eyes moving from the money to me and back again, like he was waiting for someone to tell him it was a joke. "Mum, is that—" Vanessa started. "I don't know," I said, because it was the only true thing I had left to offer them. "I don't know what this is. I don't know why it's here." "Whose dad even has this kind of money just sitting in a closet?" Corey said, and there was something in his voice that wasn't quite awe and wasn't quite fear, something closer to the beginning of anger. "Who even is he?" Nobody answered that, because none of us had an answer. Corey crouched down and picked up one of the bricks of cash, turning it over in his hands the way I had turned the bracelet over in mine. "We should count it. We should figure out how much—" "We're not touching it," Vanessa said. "I'm not stealing it, Vanessa, it's literally our house, it's literally dad's—" "We don't know whose it is." Her voice cracked on the word know. "We don't know anything right now. You want to start counting money while we don't even know if Dad is alive?" That stopped him. He set the brick down slowly, like it had gotten heavier in his hands. I zipped the bag closed myself, because I couldn't let either of them carry it, couldn't let this be the first thing they held onto from a day that had already taken so much else. "Get your things," I said. "We're going to your grandparents'." My father answered the door himself, still in his robe, and one look at my face told him this wasn't a social visit. My mother came down the stairs behind him already asking questions before she'd fully seen us, and then she saw the kids' faces and stopped asking and just opened her arms instead. We sat in their living room, the bag on the floor between us like something none of us wanted to acknowledge directly, and I told them everything. The radio. The crash. The airport, Miss Phillip, the words he never boarded. The closet. The bracelet. The money. My father didn't say much while I talked. He'd built what our family had from nothing, decades of it, the kind of old, careful wealth that doesn't announce itself, and I'd watched him read a room in silence my whole life before he ever opened his mouth in it. When I finished, he sat back and was quiet for a long moment. "Stay here tonight," he said finally. "All of you. In the morning I'll go with you to file a missing person's report myself." He glanced at the bag. "That doesn't leave this house. I have a safe in my study. It goes in there tonight, and it doesn't come out until we understand what we're dealing with." "Dad, I don't think a report is going to—" "I have people I can call," he said, cutting me off, not unkindly. "People who owe me favors going back thirty years. If William is out there somewhere, we will find him. And if something's been done to him, we will find whoever did it." He looked at me the way he used to when I was small and frightened of something in the dark. "But not tonight. Tonight you sleep." My mother put the kids in the two guest rooms down the hall and me in my old childhood bedroom, unchanged after all these years except for a fresh set of sheets, and I lay there in a bed that used to be mine in a life that used to be simpler and stared at a ceiling I used to know every crack of. I didn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Miss Phillip's face, patient and immovable. I saw the bracelet. I saw the money spread out on the closet floor like evidence in a case that didn't have a name yet. Sometime past two, I gave up and went downstairs for water, moving quietly out of old habit, the same careful steps I used to take sneaking down for a glass of juice as a teenager, avoiding the fourth stair that always creaked. The kitchen light was off. But down the hall, from the direction of my father's study, there was a thin seam of light under the door that shouldn't have been on. I stood very still. Then I heard it — a small metallic sound, deliberate, rhythmic. Someone working at something slowly, carefully, trying not to be heard. I moved toward the study on bare feet, my heart going harder with every step, and eased the door open just far enough to see. A figure in a dark hoodie crouched in front of my father's safe, gloved hands working the dial with the kind of patience that told me this wasn't the first safe they'd ever opened. I don't remember deciding to scream. I just remember the sound tearing out of me, raw and involuntary, and the figure spinning toward me so fast the hood fell back for half a second before they yanked it forward again. I ran. I don't know where I was running to, only that every instinct in my body said away, away from the study, toward the stairs, toward the sound of the house waking up around me — my father's voice shouting something, a door slamming open upstairs, Corey's name, Vanessa's name, all of it tangled together as I hit the bottom of the staircase and started up it two steps at a time. The figure came after me. I felt them behind me before I heard them, felt the air change, and then a gloved hand closed around my ankle on the fourth step and I screamed again and kicked back hard, blind, not aiming for anything except away. There was a sound I will never stop hearing — a lurch, a scrape of fabric against wood, a body losing the staircase entirely — and then nothing but the terrible, final weight of someone hitting the floor below. I turned. My father was already at the bottom of the stairs, the hallway light flooding on behind him, and in that light I could see it spreading out from beneath the hood, dark and quick and unmistakable against the pale marble of my parents' floor. Blood.

Her Husband

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