It was old footage from our kitchen. She was laughing at something I had said, flour across her cheek, Emma balanced on one hip. I stopped breathing.
Adrian stepped out from a doorway at the end of the hall.
He held a gun in one hand.
In the other, he held a portable drive.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
His quiet shoes made no sound on the wet tiles.
My fists clenched. “Put it down.”
He smiled faintly. “That is what Claire said.”
The gun was pointed at my chest, but I could not stop looking at the screens around him. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Every private moment he had taken because he believed he was entitled to it.
“You killed her,” I said.
“Claire made a choice.”
“You drove her car into that barrier.”
“She pulled the wheel.”
“You were in the car.”
“She fought. There was an accident.”
“Emma was four.”
His eyes flickered at her name.
“Emma was always the complication,” he said. “Claire became difficult after the baby. She started believing motherhood made her brave.”
The words were so calm that they frightened me more than shouting would have.
“You watched my child.”
“I observed her.”
“You locked her in rooms.”
“That was Vanessa. She lacked discipline. She confused fear with control.”
Something snapped in the doorway behind him.
Vanessa emerged from the darkness.
Her hands were cuffed in front of her. Her hair was soaked against her face. A police officer lay crumpled near the wall behind her, groaning, one hand pressed to a bleeding cut above his eye.
She had escaped the transport vehicle.
Adrian glanced at her with irritation. “You were told to stay away.”
Vanessa’s eyes were wild. “You left me.”
“I told you to be patient.”
“You said Daniel would never believe her.”
“He nearly didn’t.”
She looked at me then, and beneath the terror on her face was something almost worse: hatred for the fact that she had failed.
“You always looked at her,” Vanessa said. “Even when she was screaming, even when she was ruining every room she walked into, you looked at her like she was enough.”
I could not understand how a person could say something so ugly and still sound wounded.
“She was four,” I said.
“She had what I never had.” Vanessa’s voice cracked. “She had Claire. She had you. She could cry and people came running.”
Adrian’s mouth tightened. “This is why you were useful only until you became sentimental.”
Vanessa stared at him.
“You told me we would leave together,” she said.
