The digital clock read 4:17 a.m. when Jonas kissed me goodbye. I feigned sleep, my breathing even as his lips brushed my forehead, a practiced performance in our seven-year marriage. His work demanded these pre-dawn departures, and I had perfected the art of appearing undisturbed.
“Love you,” he whispered.
I waited until the soft click of the bedroom door before my eyes snapped open. Through the window, his Audi’s headlights sliced through the darkness. Montreal this time. A logistics conference. Another week of solo parenting in our spacious colonial, a life so perfectly arranged it sometimes felt like a dream I was afraid to wake from.
By 6:30 a.m., I was in the kitchen, making banana pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse ears for our six-year-old daughter, Eevee. She padded down the stairs, all big eyes and quiet observation.
“Is Daddy gone?” she asked, climbing onto a stool.
“Yep. Left this morning. He’ll be back Friday,” I said, sliding a plate in front of her. As she ate, something glinted on the counter: Jonas’s watch, the Omega I’d given him for our fifth anniversary. He never traveled without it. He’d once made us turn around halfway to the airport because he’d forgotten it. A strange, cold pebble of unease dropped into my stomach.
After dropping Eevee at school, I stopped for coffee. My phone pinged. A confirmation from the Hotel Bonaventure in Montreal. Jonas has checked in. I smiled, the pebble dissolving. It was his habit, forwarding these confirmations to soothe my latent anxieties—a product of a chaotic childhood he knew all too well.
The day passed in a blur of errands. I was folding laundry when my neighbor and best friend, Nicole, dropped Eevee home from school.
“Everything okay?” Nicole asked, leaning in the doorway. “You look tired.”
“Just the usual,” I said with a weak smile. “Jonas left for Montreal this morning.”
A strange flicker crossed Nicole’s face. “Montreal? Are you sure?”
“Yes, why?”
“Nothing,” she said, a little too quickly. “I thought I saw his car at the Riverside Café around lunchtime, but I must be mistaken.”
“You must be,” I said, my voice firm. “I got his hotel confirmation.” But after she left, her words lingered. The pebble was back, heavier this time.
That evening, Eevee appeared at my side, her face solemn. “We have to go, Mommy,” she whispered, her small fingers clutching my sleeve.
“Go where, sweetie?”
“Away. We have to leave.” Her voice dropped even lower. “Daddy said you would understand.”
The wooden spoon in my hand froze mid-stir. “When did Daddy say this?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled, looking at her feet. “But we can’t stay here tonight. I’m scared.”
I pulled her into a hug, my mind racing. A child’s imagination, a bad dream. It had to be. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” I soothed, my own words feeling hollow.
Later, I found myself at Jonas’s laptop. After several failed password attempts, I tried his mother’s maiden name followed by the year we met. It unlocked. I felt a pang of guilt, an intruder in my own marriage, but Nicole’s words and Eevee’s fear propelled me forward. I found a folder labeled “K2″—shipping manifests, customs declarations, invoices for companies I’d never heard of. It was dense logistics jargon, but it felt… wrong.
Then I saw the security camera app. Jonas had installed the system last year for our “safety.” I scrolled through the day’s footage and found it: a thirty-minute window from the backyard camera, precisely around the time Nicole thought she saw Jonas, was missing. Deliberately deleted. My heart began to pound.
At 2 a.m., Eevee’s scream tore through the house. I found her sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide with terror. “They were in the hallway,” she gasped. “I heard the floor creak.”
I held my trembling daughter, assuring her it was just the old house settling, but I found myself staring at her bedroom door, half expecting it to swing open.
Morning couldn’t come fast enough. The individual anomalies—the watch, Nicole’s sighting, the deleted footage, Eevee’s terror—now formed a terrifying, undeniable pattern. I moved through the house with a quiet efficiency born of old survival instincts, packing an emergency bag: cash, documents, a prepaid phone. I wrote a vague note for Jonas, claiming we’d gone to visit my estranged sister in Colorado—a lie to buy us time.
“Eevee,” I whispered, shaking her awake. “We’re going on a little trip.”
Her eyes flew open. “Because of the bad people?”
A chill snaked down my spine. “What bad people, sweetheart?”
“The ones Daddy’s afraid of.”
By 7:30 a.m., we were on the road, heading north, not west. Toward my late mother’s cottage in Vermont—a place of difficult memories, but a place of refuge. At a gas station two towns over, as I filled the tank, a man bumped into me. “Smart move,” he murmured, his mouth barely moving. “Keep moving.” Before I could react, he was gone, disappearing into a blue sedan.
Back in the car, I checked my email. A new message from Delta Airlines: a flight from Boston to Miami booked in my name for the next morning. I hadn’t booked it.
We reached the cottage as dusk settled, a small, weathered sanctuary on the edge of a quiet lake. Inside, it smelled of dust and forgotten summers. While Eevee explored, I found a box of my mother’s old photos. Near the bottom was a picture I’d never seen before: Jonas, his arm draped around a woman I didn’t recognize. The timestamp read last month.
My phone rang. Jonas. “Clarissa, what the hell is going on?” he demanded.
I played my part. “Didn’t you get my note? We’re visiting Beth.”
“I called Beth. She hasn’t heard from you.”
“I saw Nicole yesterday,” I countered, my voice cold. “She saw you in town.”
“That’s ridiculous. I was in Montreal.”
“And I found a photo, Jonas.”
He sighed, the sound crackling with condescension. “You’re being paranoid again, Clarissa. Is that what this is? Another episode?” He was using my past against me, the anxiety I’d struggled with after my father’s death, turning my own history into a weapon.
“Eevee’s been scared,” I said, my voice quiet but firm. “She said you told her we needed to leave.”
“That’s absurd. Put her on the phone.”
“She’s resting.”
“Clarissa, listen to me,” his voice softened, becoming the concerned husband I thought I knew. “Come home. We’ll talk about this. I’m worried about you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and ended the call. Immediately, a text from Nicole: Please call me. I didn’t know. You were right.
Before I could, a knock at the door. Through the window, I saw the blue sedan. The man from the gas station. I grabbed a fireplace poker.
“Alec Reigns,” he said through the door. “I know your husband. You and your daughter are in danger.”
I let him in, keeping the poker visible. “Your husband isn’t who you think he is,” he began without preamble. “He’s a smuggler. High-end counterfeit goods. And now that you’re gone, they’ll come after you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The people he really works for.” He pulled out a burner phone. “Jonas dropped this. Check the messages.”
I scrolled through texts of coded language, photos of shipping containers, and one of our house. It was real. All of it.
“He’s been planning an exit strategy,” Alec said. “The question is whether that strategy included you.”
A new call. An unknown number. “Mrs. Ren, this is Detective Max Halstrom,” a deep voice said. “I need to speak with you regarding your husband’s business dealings.”
The world was closing in. I ended the call, my hands shaking. “We need to go,” I told Alec.
“Wait,” he said. “Running makes you look guilty. There might be another way. A way to clear your name.” He looked around the cottage. “Jonas mentioned a crawl space.”
In the back of the coat closet, I found it. Hidden inside was a metal box. Stacks of cash, two high-quality fake passports with our photos but different names, and a list of addresses. Jonas had been planning to disappear. But with us, or from us?
I laid the contents on the kitchen table. “Call Detective Halstrom,” I said, my decision made. “Tell him I’ll cooperate.”
The plan was terrifyingly simple: I was the bait. From a secure hotel room in Burlington, I would call Jonas, pretend I was scared, and get him to incriminate himself while federal agents listened in.
“I’m scared, Jonas,” I said into the phone, my voice trembling for real. “I found the passports. The cash. I know about the second phone.”
There was a long pause. “You’ve been going through my things.”
“Who are you, Jonas? Really?”
“Smuggling isn’t a job,” I said, my voice hardening. “It’s a crime.”
He laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. “You think it’s that simple? The world runs on gray areas, Clarissa.”
“And Philip Taylor?” I asked, naming the missing accountant Halstrom had told me about. “Is he a gray area, too?”
The silence that followed was deafening. “Who’s been filling your head with this garbage?” he finally snarled. “Alec Reigns? Has he found you yet?”
My blood ran cold. How could he know about Alec unless someone told him?
That night, after Eevee was asleep, a new email from Jonas arrived. No subject. Just an address and the words, See for yourself. Then another, with a photo of me and Eevee at the park, taken from a distance. More followed—us at the grocery store, at school. We had been under surveillance. The final email contained four words: I was protecting you.
My phone rang. It was Nicole. “Clarissa, listen,” she said, her voice frantic. “I’ve been going through some of Jonas’s old papers. There’s something you need to know about your father’s company.”
“It went bankrupt years ago.”
“That’s what Jonas told you. But according to these documents, he was involved in the takeover. He was working with the buyers before you even met him.”
The implication was a physical blow. He targeted me. As we spoke, I watched Alec’s blue sedan pull into the hotel parking lot. The pieces were slamming together, forming a picture of a life that was a complete fabrication.
“We need to move,” I told Halstrom urgently. “Alec is here, and I think he’s working with Jonas.”
We escaped through a service exit into the employee parking lot. As we reached Halstrom’s car, a shadow detached itself from the darkness.
“Clarissa.” It was Jonas.
Halstrom drew his weapon. “Stop right there!”
“I’m not armed,” Jonas said, raising his hands. “I just need to talk to my wife.” He looked at me, his face haggard. “I’ve been tracking your phone since the day we met. For your protection. Your father was laundering money for the Kane family. When he tried to cheat them, they came after him. The bankruptcy, the drinking… it was all aftermath. I was hired to watch you, but then I fell in love.”
“Daddy said the bad men were coming,” Eevee said quietly from behind me.
“Philip Taylor is in a safe house,” Jonas continued, ignoring her. “The evidence against the Kanes is at the storage unit. The one at the address I sent you.” His eyes hardened. “Alec Reigns works for the Kanes. Always has. If he’s found you, you’re already in danger.”
As if on cue, headlights swept across the lot. Alec stepped out of his car, a gun in his hand. “Well, isn’t this a touching family reunion?”
Before anyone could react, I pulled the flare gun I’d found at the cottage from my pocket, aimed it at the sky, and fired. The red flare exploded, momentarily blinding everyone. In the chaos, Halstrom tackled Alec. Jonas shoved me and Eevee toward the car. “Go! The storage unit! Everything you need is there!”
He ran back to help Halstrom as I peeled out of the lot, another car already in hot pursuit.
“Mommy,” Eevee said, her voice small but steady. “I know a shortcut.”
Following her directions, we lost our tail and found the storage facility. I left Eevee locked in the car with my phone. “Call 911 if anyone but me comes back.”
Unit 217. I rolled up the metal door. Inside were boxes of files and a large safe. The evidence was overwhelming, implicating politicians, business leaders—all tied to Victor Kane. The safe was ajar. I grabbed a USB drive labeled “Insurance” just as footsteps approached.
“Clarissa.” It was Nicole. “Thank God. I followed you. Are you okay?”
Relief washed over me, but only for a second. Something in her tone was wrong.
“It’s over,” she said, stepping into the unit. “Halstrom arrested Alec.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, my grip tightening on a heavy flashlight.
Her expression hardened. She pulled a gun from her jacket. “I’m sorry, Clarissa. But Victor can’t afford to have this evidence get out.”
“You were sleeping with him,” I stalled, my mind racing.
“Especially then,” she sneered. “Now, the USB drive.”
As she glanced toward the safe where I pretended it was hidden, I swung the flashlight, hitting her wrist. The gun clattered to the floor. We struggled, a desperate, violent dance among the boxes of lies. With a final shove, I sent her crashing into a metal shelving unit, which toppled, pinning her beneath it. I grabbed the gun, slammed the door, and padlocked it shut.
Back at the car, Eevee was on the phone. “Mommy, I called 911 like you said. They’re coming.”
I gathered her into a fierce hug, tears streaming down my face. As police sirens wailed in the distance, I held my daughter close, the key to our future heavy in my pocket. The life I had known was counterfeit, but the love for my child—and the strength it gave me—was the only truth that mattered.