“Are you accusing me of something,” she said.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
“But I’m going to find out.”
She stepped closer to me.
“You’ll ruin us both if you go digging,” she said. “Is that what you want?”
“I want the truth,” I said. “About my wife.”
“About my daughters’ mother.”
“You owe me that much.”
Vanessa’s face softened, just for a second.
Then it hardened again.
“Fine,” she said. “Dig all you want.”
“You won’t find anything, because there’s nothing to find.”
She walked out of the study.
I stood there a long time, staring at the old phone.
I thought back to the gallery opening where we’d first met.
It had been eight months after Eleanor’s funeral.
I hadn’t wanted to go.
A friend from work had dragged me out, said I needed air.
Vanessa had been standing near a painting of a lighthouse, alone.
She’d made a joke about the price tag.
I’d laughed for the first time in months.
At the time it felt like fate.
Looking back now, it felt like a trap that had been set long before that night.
She’d known exactly which gallery I’d be at.
She’d known exactly which painting to stand beside.
I hadn’t questioned any of it then.
Grief makes a person easy to guide.
I understood that now, sitting alone in the study at midnight.
I also remembered a school conference, almost a year into our engagement.
Grace’s teacher had mentioned, gently, that Grace seemed anxious lately, quieter than usual.
Vanessa had laughed it off in the car afterward.
“Kids go through phases,” she’d said. “She’ll grow out of it.”
I hadn’t pushed back at the time.
I hadn’t asked Grace directly what was actually bothering her.
Looking back, I understood exactly which phase Grace had been going through.
The kind where a child learns to stay quiet to avoid a grown-up’s temper.
I thought about how many small warning signs I had explained away over three years.
A missing earring here, a snapped comment there, a strange tension whenever I left for work.
None of it, alone, had seemed like proof of anything.
Together, it painted a picture I simply hadn’t wanted to see.
I promised myself that night I would never again mistake convenience for truth.
I didn’t sleep much that night.
I sat in the dark, scrolling through years of old photos on my phone.
Vanessa at the girls’ birthday parties.
Vanessa at Sunday dinners, laughing with my mother.
Vanessa signing the lease on our lake house together.
Every photo looked different now.
Not warm anymore.
Careful. Rehearsed. Watching for something.
Around three in the morning, I called Raymond Cole.
