Chapter 4 The Drawer That Wasn't Locked Before

Corinne's POV

I called the number back four times before I gave up.

Straight to a voicemail box that wasn't set up. No name. No greeting. Just a robotic voice telling me the mailbox belonged to no one, over and over, as the person who sent that text had never planned on being found. I stood in my kitchen at seven in the morning with the phone pressed so hard against my ear it left a mark, staring at the message still glowing on my screen.

You should also know he's not the only reason someone is watching your house tonight.

I hadn't slept. Nora hadn't either. I'd heard her moving around her room half the night, and around three I'd finally given up pretending and crawled into her bed instead of my own, the way we used to when we were little, and thunderstorms scared her. Neither of us said anything about Dad. We just lay there in the dark, not sleeping together, which felt slightly less unbearable than not sleeping alone.

I brought the phone straight to Reyes.

He met me at the station instead of making me come inside, which I appreciated more than I expected to. He read the message twice, his face doing that careful, controlled thing that grown-ups do when they don't want to scare you but also don't want to lie to you.

"We'll trace what we can," he said. "Burner numbers like this are hard, but not impossible. I want you to save this exact screenshot and stop replying to it, in case whoever sent it is waiting to see if you'll engage."

"Someone was watching my house last night." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to, worn down from no sleep and too much crying. "While I was telling my twelve-year-old sister our dad is dead. That's what you're telling me."

"It's what the message says." Reyes's voice stayed even, steady, the same calm he'd used crouching next to me in that hallway. "It might be nothing. Sometimes people send cruel things after a death shows up in the news, trying to scare a grieving family for their own sick reasons. It might also be something. I'm not going to pretend I know which yet."

At least he didn't lie to make me feel better. I'd take honesty over comfort right then, even ugly honesty.

"Corinne." He waited until I looked at him. "Your father worked in numbers most people never look at twice. I've seen his name come up in places I can't explain to you yet, and I'd rather not guess out loud until I know more. So I need you to do something for me. When you go through his things, his desk, his files, anything at the house, call me before you touch anything you think looks strange. Not the department line. Me, directly." He wrote a number on the back of a card and pressed it into my hand like it was something fragile. "Anything odd. Even if it seems small."

I didn't ask him what he thought I might find. I think some part of me already understood I wouldn't like the answer.

The next three days went by in pieces instead of hours. I remember picking out a suit for Dad to be buried in and realizing halfway through the store that my hands were shaking too hard to read the size tags. I remember Nora refusing to eat anything except dry cereal straight from the box, standing at the counter eating it by the handful like her body had forgotten what a plate was for. I remember Marisol showing up at our door with a casserole she'd clearly never made before in her life, burnt on one side, and how we both laughed so hard about it that the laughing turned into crying and neither of us minded.

I remember almost nothing else. Grief does that. It eats whole days and leaves you only the sharp little pieces that hurt the most.

The night before the funeral, I couldn't sleep, so I finally made myself go into Dad's office. Somebody needed to sort through his desk eventually, and it felt wrong letting a stranger from the estate lawyer's office be the one to touch his things first. I told myself I was being responsible. Really, I think I just wanted to sit somewhere that still smelled like him before that smell faded for good.

His desk was a mess from the break-in, drawers hanging open, papers still scattered where the police had left them after taking photos. I started stacking things back into some kind of order, mostly just to keep my hands busy, when I reached the bottom drawer on the left side.

It didn't open.

I tried again, thinking it was just stuck, the way old furniture sticks in humid weather. Nothing. I got down on my knees and looked at the drawer face closely, and that's when I noticed the small brass keyhole set into the wood, a keyhole that had never been there before. I would have noticed. I organized this desk with him a hundred times, paying bills together at the kitchen table before he moved the whole operation into this office two years ago. This drawer never locked. It didn't even have a lock built into it originally.

Someone had installed one.

My hands went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. I checked the other drawers; all of them opened easily, sliding smoothly on their tracks like always. Just this one, low and easy to miss unless you were looking for it, fitted with a lock that hadn't existed a few weeks ago.

I thought about calling Reyes right then, as I'd promised. My hand actually found my phone in my pocket.

But something stopped me, some small, stubborn part of me that needed to know what was inside before I handed it to anyone else, even someone as kind as Reyes had been. This was my father's desk. My father's secret, whatever it was. And some ugly, aching feeling low in my chest told me that once I called that number on the card, I would never get to be the one who found out what he'd been hiding first.

I grabbed the letter opener off the desk and jammed the tip into the seam above the lock, working it back and forth the way I'd seen Dad do a hundred times with stuck windows, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.

The wood cracked. The lock gave.

And just as the drawer finally slid open in front of me, my phone lit up on the desk beside it, not a text this time, but a call, from the same unlisted number that had reached out the night my father died, ringing through the silent office like it somehow knew the exact second I'd broken in.