Chapter 1

My husband had been traveling a lot lately. Intuition told me he was cheating.

I kept quiet. For his birthday, I gifted him AirPods—secretly linked to my backup Apple ID.

At 10:00 p.m., his "Find My" location wasn't heading to the airport. It had stopped at a decade-abandoned lumber yard.

I floored it, obsessed with catching them in bed.

But when I arrived, I only found a corpse.

——

"Are you sure you want to pack that cashmere coat for Portland? It rains every day out there." I leaned against the bedroom doorframe, watching Silas stuff dress shirts into his suitcase.

"The meetings are all indoors. I still have to look like a senior partner ready to close a ten-million-dollar deal." He didn't even look up, expertly zipping the luggage shut.

He stood up, walked over to me, and leaned down to press a kiss to my forehead.

"Flight's at eleven-thirty. I gotta go. Make sure you keep the doors locked while I'm away."

"I know. Text me when you land." I forced a smile.

The front door clicked shut, and the house fell completely silent. I walked over to the wet bar and poured myself a glass of red wine.

The wall clock ticked to 9:45 p.m.

Silas had been acting increasingly irregular lately—taking hushed work calls late into the night behind my back, while the frequency of his business trips had doubled.

I went without interrogating him. Instead, for his thirtieth birthday last week, I gifted him a pair of AirPods engraved with his initials.

As a lawyer, he would never let his earpieces out of his sight.

But what he didn't know was that before I handed them over, I had secretly bound them to my backup Apple ID.

10:00 p.m. I sat on the couch, swiped to unlock my phone screen, and tapped open the "Find My" app.

The map took two seconds to load. Originally, I just wanted to verify that he had made it to the terminal.

However, the red dot representing Silas's AirPods wasn't moving anywhere along the airport highway.

It had stopped at the northernmost edge of the city. A massive, undeveloped area. I pinched to zoom in on the map.

'Blackwood Lumber Yard'.

It was an industrial zone that had been abandoned for ten years. Why would a lawyer about to fly out to an executive conference in Portland be out there in the middle of the night?

Hooking up with a mistress? Or some other kind of shady transaction?

I dialed his number. The receiver only gave me an automated prompt: "The subscriber you have dialed is powered off."

Suspicion and anger flared in my chest.

I grabbed my car keys and jacket, running out into the rainy night.

The wipers slapped frantically against the windshield, my high beams cutting through the pitch-black, unlit suburban roads.

Twenty minutes later, my car turned down a muddy dirt road.

Up ahead, there was no sign of Silas's silver Jaguar.

What I found instead was the flashing of red and blue police lights.

Three cruisers were parked outside the rusted iron gates of the abandoned factory, yellow crime scene tape whipping violently in the wind and rain. Several officers wearing reflective vests swept their flashlights through the tall weeds, searching for something.

I slammed on the brakes, the tires skidding and grinding through the mud.

A short-haired woman wearing a black windbreaker turned around. The harsh beam of her flashlight hit me right in the face, forcing me to throw an arm up to shield my eyes.

"This is a restricted area, ma'am. Back your vehicle out, immediately." Her voice was sharp and stern.

I shoved the car door open, the rain instantly soaking my hair. "My husband might be here. My tracking device shows him at this exact location."

The woman paused. She clicked off her flashlight and walked up to the front of my car. In the red glow of my taillights, I caught sight of the badge pinned to her chest. 'Detective Vance'.

"What's your fiancé's name?" Detective Vance looked me up and down.

"Silas. Silas Vaughn." I swallowed hard.

Detective Vance didn't answer right away. She turned her head, looking deep into the factory lot—toward an area bleached stark white by several heavy floodlights.

Over there, two crime scene investigators in white Tyvek suits were crouching on the ground.

"Ms. Vaughn," Vance said, turning her icy gaze back to me. "You'd better come with me."