Chapter Five
LILY
“It has to be here somewhere,” I muttered. Again. I must have said that to myself a hundred times in the last hour. In the last few months.
This wasn't the first time I'd searched Trey's office. My husband had been organized. Methodical. Keys hung on the hook at the back door every time he parked the car. Shoes lined up in his closet. His pen aligned on his desk just so.
Yet somehow, he'd managed to misfile or lose almost every piece of paperwork I needed. If I wanted years of utility bills, they were here, filed by date, starting with the first month we'd moved into the house.
I had access to our bank accounts, to our homeowner's insurance. I had copies of Adam's shot records, and the will Trey left behind. None of that would help me now.
Knox Sinclair's arrival in our lives was a shock to the system. Adam and I were in a rut, existing day-to-day, not ready to figure out what came next.
The night before, as I lay in bed, I'd realized something.
Knox Sinclair was here to keep us safe. Great. Now I could sleep at night. Woo-hoo.
Except, I wasn't sleeping. The truth was that Knox could keep us safe, but he couldn't set us free. He could offer us security—security that would eventually drain my bank account dry—but then what?
What were we going to do? Stay here in his house forever? I didn't want to be here. Not in this house, not in Black Rock. The small town was beautiful, and the people were nice, but this wasn't my place. This wasn't my life.
This was the life Trey had wanted, the life he'd tried to convince me I should want. Now that he was gone, I should have been able to leave, to decide what my life was going to be.
Instead, I was trapped here by Trey's secrecy and my own ignorance. Somewhere in this house was the key to setting us free. I just had to find it. And I was running out of time.
I had to keep him safe. Adam. Nothing mattered more than my son.
My entire life all I wanted was to be a mom. Other little girls dreamed of being a doctor or a movie star. Not me. To the deep disappointment of my parents, I never had career aspirations.
I didn't want to be a lawyer, or a professor, or a ballet dancer. I didn't want to go into finance. I didn't want to win a Nobel Prize.
I wanted to be a mom and a wife. I wanted a family. I wanted to cook dinners and match socks. To drive my kids to games and practices, to pick them up from school and playdates. I wanted to rub my husband's shoulders after a long day. To read bedtime stories and play make-believe.
I'd grown up ashamed of those dreams. I was a woman in the new millennia. I could be anything. And of all those options, I wanted to be a mom.
I never understood why that was such a disappointment to my parents. In my mind, raising children is one of the most worthwhile things I could do with my life. My professor father and artist mother could only mourn my lack of ambition.
“You have so much potential,” they'd said when I'd turned down an internship my father had wrangled for me in favor of babysitting. “Don't waste it with children. Do something meaningful.”
It was probably a blessing that they'd kicked me out when I'd married Trey. At least I didn't have to listen to their 'I told you so's'.
When Trey wanted to give up on getting pregnant, he'd broken my heart. He’d refused to meet with the doctor. Refused for either of us to get more tests. He kept saying everything would work itself out, but he wouldn't tell me what that meant.
Distance grew between us. He was traveling more and turning to me in the night less. I'd started to think I'd made a mistake when everything changed.
I'll never forget that night. It was the first snow of the year, and the roads were slick. I was worried about Trey driving in from the airport. The rush of relief at the rumble of the garage door took me by surprise.
I met him at the door, ready to take his bags from his hand, and found him standing there, a tiny, blanket-wrapped bundle in his arms. He pushed the bundle at me, and I'd looked down to see a red scrunched face crowned by a cloud of wispy, white-blond hair. One look and I'd fallen in love.
Adam changed everything. I was too distracted by the child I'd always wanted to wonder about Trey's constant travel and locked office door. I didn't notice when he started sleeping in the guest room. I accepted his vague excuses when I wondered why our adopted son looked so much like my husband.
He'd given me my dream, and in my joy, I let him off the hook for everything else.
I was a fool. I'd buried my head in the sand, let Adam consume me, and now we were paying the price.
I was a mother, and it was everything I'd dreamed it would be. But, in all my imaginings of hugs and bedtime stories, I'd never guessed at the fear of not being enough. Of not being able to keep him safe. Of failing him.
I had to keep looking until I found what I needed.
Where to start? I stood in the middle of Trey's office and turned in a slow circle.
It looked like a layout from a decorating magazine.
The Gentleman's Office. Tobacco brown leather sofa surrounded by dark woodwork.
Persian rug. Huge desk, the surface an acre of mahogany.
Trey's brown leather chair dotted with brass nubs.
No computer in sight, only the blotter and the crystal and brass pen holder. Trey's laptop was in the drawer. I pulled it out and flipped it open, entering his password. Adam. Not very stealthy.
The home screen popped up. I stared at it blankly. This was not the first time I'd searched Trey's computer.
You know the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome. Buy me a ticket for the crazy train because I was going to search this thing one more time.
After half an hour of opening folders, scrolling, checking documents and doing the whole thing again, I closed the laptop.
There was nothing there. That couldn't be right. I knew it couldn't be right. Trey had used his laptop for everything. Hadn't he? There were some files that seemed to relate to the business. An accounting app. But that was it.
The laptop was strangely empty, almost as if it was supposed to look like Trey's laptop, but he hadn't actually used it. I wanted to reject that idea as soon as it entered my mind. The idea that there might be another laptop out there made my stomach twist.
If this laptop was a decoy…the implications cascaded through my brain. A second laptop meant Trey had something to hide. Something big. A second laptop was a level of deviousness, of forethought, that confirmed Trey was not the man I thought he was.
I wasn't ready to go there. I wasn't ready to accept that my husband was involved in business dealings he felt he had to hide. I wanted to think he'd just been a bad record keeper. I could have held on to that excuse if not for the meticulously organized drawers of bills I'd already found.
A man who kept every cable bill for years wasn't a sloppy record keeper. A man that careful would be good at hiding his secrets. I glared at the useless laptop on the desk as if I could demand answers it wasn't going to give.
Pushing back from the desk, I crossed the room to the closet. The walk-in closet had shelves on one side and built-in file cabinets on the other.
I'd searched here more than once. I was going to do it again. I refused to accept that what I was looking for might not be in the house. That it might have disappeared along with Trey.
It was here somewhere. I'd seen it, once upon a time. I would find it. I had to. Adam's life depended on it.