Chapter 4: The Woman Who Kept Everything
By midnight I had read all fourteen letters.
Alina had written to Sofia every month without missing one.
Drawings tucked inside.
Small pressed flowers from wherever she was living.
Updates about her days, careful and cheerful and clearly written for a child who she hoped would one day read them.
And threaded through the later ones, almost as an afterthought, fragments of what had actually happened.
Veronica had gone to Alina six weeks after our wedding.
She had shown her photographs.
Messages between Alina and a colleague from her old firm — a man named Patrick — that looked, taken out of context, like something they weren't.
Veronica had told Alina she would present them to a family court judge.
She had told her she would make sure Alina was painted as unstable, unfaithful, unfit.
She had told her the only clean exit was to disappear quietly and let Sofia have a better life.
*I believed her,* Alina had written in the ninth letter.
*I know how that sounds.
But she was so certain.
She knew things about our house, our routines, our arguments.
She knew things I had never told anyone.
I thought she must have something real.
I was so frightened of losing Sofia in a courtroom that I ran instead.
I have regretted it every single day.*
I set the last letter down and opened my laptop.
Veronica had been my assistant for three years.
She had managed my calendar, my correspondence, my travel.
She had had access to my email, my phone, my home security system.
I had given her all of it because I trusted her efficiency.
Because she was good at her job.
Because I had never once thought to ask what she was doing with the access I handed her.
I pulled up the home security account.
The login history showed her name on dates I hadn't been home.
Dates I had been traveling.
She had been accessing the cameras while I was away — not just checking the house, but reviewing footage, downloading clips.
My stomach turned.
I went to the filing cabinet in the corner of the study.
The one where I kept personal documents — insurance, medical records, Sofia's birth certificate.
The folders were exactly as I had left them.
But at the very back, behind a folder of old tax returns, there was a small USB drive I didn't recognize.
I held it under the lamp.
It was labeled in Veronica's handwriting.
One word.
*Insurance.*
I didn't plug it in.
Not yet.
I locked it in the desk drawer and sat back in the chair and thought about what kind of woman plans for the possibility that her husband might one day look too closely.
The kind who had been planning this for a long time.
The kind who had walked into my office three years ago with a perfect resume and a composed smile, and had started, from that first day, building something I hadn't seen until now.
I thought about Alina in whatever apartment she was living in, writing letters to a daughter she believed would never read them.
I thought about Sofia in that apron.
I picked up my phone and called my brother.
He answered on the third ring, voice thick with sleep.
"Marcus," I said.
"I need you to come over.
Tonight."
A pause.
"Daniel, it's past midnight."
"I know," I said.
"Please come."
Another pause.
Then: "I'll be there in twenty minutes."
I sat in the dark study with the box of letters on the desk and waited for my brother to arrive, and I thought about one more thing Alina had written in her final letter — a single sentence at the very end, almost a postscript.
May you like
*She told me she had loved you for years before I ever met you.
She said I was always in the way.*
