For one frozen second, I could not move. Every instinct in me wanted to rush up those stairs, grab her shoulders, demand an explanation for eight months of grief, a funeral, a grave, a life I had been forced to continue without her.
Then I heard a floorboard creak somewhere above the kitchen.
Elena put one finger to her lips.
Someone else was in the house.
I lowered the crowbar by an inch.
She eased through the basement doorway and closed it behind her without letting the latch catch. In the dim spill of light from the stairwell, she looked thinner than I remembered. Her hair, once silver at the temples, had been cut short and dyed dark. A faint scar crossed the edge of her jaw.
I stared at it because it was easier than looking into her eyes.
“You’re alive,” I breathed.
Her face folded with pain.
“Yes.”
I nearly struck the wall with the crowbar.
“You let me bury you.”
“I know.”
“You let me stand over a coffin.”
“I know.”
“You let me wake up every morning thinking you were dead.”
She closed her eyes.
“Arthur, I will answer everything. But not while the man upstairs is searching for the journal.”
The words cut through the shock.
“Who?”
“Noah’s accountant. The one who helped move the offshore money.”
Footsteps crossed the floor above us.
Elena reached beneath her jacket and pulled out a small phone.
“I have someone listening. If we can get outside, we can end this.”
I almost laughed. “Someone?”
“My attorney.”
“You have an attorney.”
“I have a great many things I should have told you years ago.”
That answer nearly destroyed whatever control I had left.
But the footsteps stopped directly over our heads.
A drawer opened upstairs.
Then another.
Elena pointed toward the furnace. Behind it, where the false wall had been cut open, a narrow service passage ran beneath the old addition. I had forgotten it existed. The house had been expanded before we bought it, and a previous owner had left access to pipes through a crawlspace that opened near the side yard.
“You knew about that?” I whispered.
“I hid the box beside it because I knew you would find the seam eventually.”
“You planned all of this.”
“Too much of it.”
She crawled first.
I followed because staying in the basement meant handing the journal to whoever had locked me there.
The passage smelled of soil, rust, and old insulation. My knees protested every movement. Elena moved quickly, as though she had practiced. That thought hurt too.
Halfway through, I heard the basement door swing open behind us.
A man’s voice cursed.
Elena did not look back.
We reached the exterior panel and pushed through into cold evening air. A dark sedan sat at the curb with its lights off. The driver’s door opened.
A woman in her fifties stepped out holding a phone.
“Mrs. Vance?” she called softly.
Elena raised one hand.
The woman immediately spoke into the phone. “They’re out. Send them.”
Within seconds, distant sirens began rising somewhere beyond the neighborhood.
I turned on Elena.
