Chapter 1 The Folder Under the Stairs

Paul's POV

My mother is marrying the man who ruined my life, and nobody in this church knows it but me.

I dig my nails into the wood of the pew and watch Garrett Holt fix his tie at the altar like he's bored with his own father's wedding. Three years. Three years since he stood in that hallway at Westbrook and watched his friends tear me apart, and he didn't say one word to stop them. He just laughed. That laugh is the only thing about him I will never forget, no matter how good he looks in a suit right now.

I was fourteen. New kid. I walked into the freshman assembly with a stupid, hopeful feeling in my chest, like maybe high school would be different. Then Garrett's friend Dean knocked my bag out of my hands in front of three hundred people, and when everything spilled out onto the floor, the whole gym laughed. Garrett didn't throw my bag. Garrett didn't say the words. But Garrett stood two feet away with his arms crossed, and he laughed too, like it was the funniest thing he'd seen all week. I have hated him quietly every single day since.

And now my mother is sliding a ring onto his father's finger like none of that matters.

I clap when everyone else claps. I smile when the photographer points the camera at our row. Inside, I am doing math. Two new bedrooms. One new house. One new last name nobody asked me about. I am going to be sleeping across the hall from the boy who let three hundred people laugh at me, and I am supposed to call this family.

The reception is a blur of things I don't care about: cake, music, my mother's face glowing in a way I haven't seen since before my dad left us. I hold onto that part. I hold onto the way she keeps touching Roland's arm like she still can't believe he's real. She deserves this. She's worked two jobs since I was ten. If marrying Roland Holt makes her this happy, I can survive a house. I can survive Garrett Holt ignoring me in the hallway at school the same way he's ignored me for three years.

That's the deal we made without ever saying it out loud. At the reception, he caught my eye for one second over his father's shoulder, and something passed between us that wasn't quite a truce. More like two people agreeing not to start a war they don't have the energy for. Fine. I can do invisible. I've been invisible since I was fourteen.

By the time we get to the new house, it's dark, and boxes are already stacked in a hallway that isn't mine yet. My room is across from his. I find that out the hard way, dragging my last box down the hall and almost walking straight into his open door. He's not even looking at me. He's lying on his bed scrolling his phone like I'm a draft of cold air that passed through and left again. Good. That's the deal.

I spend an hour unpacking books onto a shelf that still smells like someone else's furniture polish. My mom pokes her head in to ask if I'm okay, and I tell her I'm fine, because she looks so happy I can't make myself say anything else. She kisses my forehead and goes back downstairs to dance in the kitchen with her new husband like a teenager.

I need more shelf space. That's it. That's the whole reason I open the hallway closet, looking for an empty box I can break down and use as a bookend, something stupid and small. The closet is stuffed with winter coats, old shoes, and a vacuum cleaner missing its hose. Shoved all the way at the back, behind a broken lamp, there's a box. Someone wrote BOOKS on the side of it in black marker.

But the handwriting is my mother's.

That's strange enough that I almost don't open it. My mom doesn't have boxes in this house. We just moved in. Unless she put something here before the wedding. Unless she's been in this house before tonight.

I tell myself it's nothing. I pull the box out anyway, because curiosity has always been my worst habit, the thing that gets me in trouble, the thing my mom says will be the death of me one day. I peel back the flaps.

There are no books inside.

There's a folder, thick and yellow, tucked under a stack of papers held together with a rubber band that's gone brittle with age. On top is a letter from somewhere called Halverson Investigations. Below that, a stapled set of pages with the word SETTLEMENT printed across the top in bold letters. My stomach drops before my brain even catches up to why.

I see my mother's signature first. Lila Sutcliffe, in her neat looping handwriting, the same signature that's on every permission slip she's ever signed for me. Right next to it, on the same line, is another name.

Roland Holt.

The date at the top of the page stops my heart completely. Two years ago. Almost two full years before tonight's wedding. Two years ago, my mother and Roland Holt signed something together, something with a private investigator's name stamped across the top, something that paid somebody to stay quiet.

Two years ago, Garrett's mother was still alive.

My hands are shaking so hard the papers rattle. I flip to the next page, and one phrase jumps out at me in plain black ink, a phrase that doesn't belong in any wedding, any happy family, any normal life; the words regarding the accident involving Margaret Holt are not, in fact, accidental.

The folder slips out of my hands and hits the floor with a sound way too loud for an empty hallway.

That's when I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. Slow. Steady. Coming straight toward me.

Garrett's footsteps.