"Get out of my house!" My fiancée screamed at a three-year-old girl standing in the marble hallway of my mansion, and when I heard those words from the top of the staircase, I realized something was terribly wrong.

I waited.

Marisol crouched down in front of Valentina and spoke to her quietly in Spanish, something gentle and low that I couldn't follow.

Valentina looked at her mother's face, then nodded once with the gravity of a child who has been asked to be brave before and knows how.

Marisol stood and looked toward the kitchen.

"Can she sit with Mrs.

Okafor?" she asked.

"Just for a few minutes."

Mrs.

Okafor was the cook, a large and warm woman who had worked in the house longer than anyone.

I called through to the kitchen and she appeared in the doorway almost immediately, took one look at Valentina's face, and held out her hand without asking a single question.

"Come, little one," she said.

"I have something on the stove that needs tasting."

Valentina looked up at her mother.

Marisol nodded.

The little girl crossed the hallway, still holding the rabbit, and took Mrs.

Okafor's hand.

They disappeared into the kitchen.

The door swung shut behind them.

I turned back to Marisol.

"Tell me," I said.

She pressed her hands together in front of her.

"When Paulina came to this house the first time — before you introduced her to the staff, before the engagement — she came alone.

You were traveling.

She told me she was a close friend of yours and that you had asked her to look in on the property."

"I never asked her to do that."

"I know.

I didn't know it then." Marisol met my eyes.

"She walked through the house.

She asked me questions about the staff, about the schedule, about who had access to which rooms.

I thought she was just curious.

She was very charming." A pause.

"She spent a long time in your study."

Something cold moved through me.

"How long?"

"Nearly an hour.

She said she was looking for a book you had recommended to her." Marisol's voice was careful and even.

"Three days later, you called me and told me you were bringing someone home for dinner.

That was the first time I saw her with you."

"She was in my study alone for an hour," I said.

"Yes."

"Before I had ever introduced her to anyone in this house."

"Yes."

I thought about what was kept in that study.

The early company documents.

The personal files.

The safe behind the left panel of the bookcase that my father had installed and that I had never changed the combination on because I had never thought I needed to.

"Marisol," I said.

"Did anything seem different in the house after that visit?

Anything missing, anything moved?"

She hesitated.

That hesitation was its own answer.

"There was a folder," she said slowly.

"A brown folder that used to sit on the left side of your desk.

I had dusted around it for months.

After her visit, it was gone.

I assumed you had moved it yourself.

I didn't think it was my place to ask."

"What was in it?"

"I don't know.

I never looked inside it."

I walked to the study.

Marisol followed me to the doorway but didn't come in.

The room looked exactly as it always did — orderly, familiar, unchanged.

I went to the desk first.

The left side held a stack of current contracts and a notepad.

Nothing unusual.

Then I went to the bookcase and pressed the left panel.

It swung open.

The safe was there.

I entered the combination and pulled the handle.

The safe was not empty.

But the document I was looking for — the one my father had made me promise to keep, the original shareholder agreement from the first company, the one with the clause about inheritance rights that my lawyers had told me was the most important piece of paper I owned — was not where I had left it.

In its place was a single sheet of paper.

Blank except for four words written in Paulina's handwriting.

*You were too trusting.*