Chapter 4 - Blood in the Snow
The banging stopped after seven minutes.
Through the security monitor above my desk, I watched Conrad drag Derek by the arm down the gravel drive toward Conrad’s Mercedes. Derek was stumbling, gesturing wildly with both hands, shouting into the teeth of the gale. Conrad pushed him into the passenger seat, slammed the door with a violent jerk, and sped away, spitting grey slush against the perimeter fence.
Silence returned to the shop.
My hip was an inferno. I sat down heavily in the office chair, the pain forcing a low groan from between my teeth. I rolled up my left pant leg. A dark, purplish-black hematoma the size of a dinner plate was blooming across my hip bone and running down the side of my thigh. The skin was tight, hot to the touch.
I reached for the office landline. There was one person I knew who wouldn't look away.
I dialed. It rang twice.
"Dad?"
The voice was breathless, panicked, and cracked with emotion. It wasn't Melissa.
It was Joanna, my younger daughter.
"Jo," I said quietly.
"Dad! Where are you? Are you okay? I've been calling your cell for two hours!" Her words tumbled out in a frantic rush, the sound of her four-year-old son Toby whimpering in the background. "I was in the kitchen getting Toby’s medicine when... when it happened. I came out and saw you walking out the front door, and Derek was standing there holding his drink, and Conrad was... Dad, I screamed at them. I packed the kids in the car and left right behind you."
The knot in my chest, tight as an anchor chain since four o'clock that afternoon, loosened just enough for me to breathe.
"I’m at the shop, Jo," I said softly.
"Are you hurt? Dad, the way you hit that floor... the sound it made..."
"My hip took the brunt of it. It’s swollen up pretty bad, but nothing feels broken. Just bruised to hell."
"I’m coming over right now."
"Joanna, the roads are freezing over—"
"I don't care if the sky is falling, Dad. I’m ten minutes away. Don't you move."
The line clicked dead.
I rested my forehead against the cool laminate of the desk. Sarah used to say that Joanna had my stubbornness and Melissa had my softness. But looking back over the last six years, I realized with a pang of bitter grief that Melissa’s softness had been twisted. Derek had spent half a decade pruning her instincts, isolating her from anyone who might tell her that her husband’s grandiosity was built on sand and theft.
Fifteen minutes later, headlights swept across the shop floor.
The side door clicked open. Joanna hurried inside, carrying a medical kit and a thermos of hot broth. She had tossed her winter coat over her Thanksgiving sweater, her dark hair pulled back in a messy knot. The moment her eyes landed on me sitting hunched behind the desk, tears sprang to her lashes.
She didn't say a word. She dropped her bag, walked straight around the desk, and wrapped her arms around my neck, burying her face into my wool work shirt.
"I’m so sorry," she whispered, her shoulders trembling. "I’m so sorry I wasn't in that room to stop him."
"It wasn't your fault, sweetheart," I said, patting her back with a heavy hand. "Nobody stops Derek when Conrad’s egging him on."
Joanna pulled back, her eyes hardening with an intensity that reminded me fiercely of her mother. "It’s not just Derek, Dad. Melissa didn't move. She just sat there."
"She’s terrified of him, Jo."
"That doesn't give her the right to let him treat you like a stray dog!" Joanna’s voice echoed in the cavernous shop. "You built their life! You paid for the roof over their heads! You paid for Toby’s birth when my insurance fell through, and you never asked a dime from either of us! How could she sit there?"
"Because she doesn't know the ground she's standing on is about to disappear," I said.
I turned the computer monitor toward her.
Joanna leaned in, squinting at the spreadsheets, the corporate filings, and the declining bank alerts. For three full minutes, the only sound was the hum of the heater and the rustle of paper as she flipped through the merchant records.
Her face went through three distinct stages: confusion, shock, and then a cold, sickening horror.
"Who is Chloe?" Joanna whispered, her finger stopping on a line item from three weeks ago.
I leaned forward. "What?"
Joanna pointed to an invoice from Bailey & Hawthorne Fine Jewelers that had cleared in September. Beneath the transaction code was a customer reference note attached by the boutique’s concierge:
*Special Order: 2.4ct Cushion Solitaire — Recipient: Chloe Vance. Engraving: 'Forever Our Horizon - D.H.'*
The air left my lungs.
"Chloe Vance?" I repeated the name slowly.
"Conrad’s junior partner," Joanna said, her voice dropping to a horrified whisper. "The woman Derek brought to the firm's summer barbecue. Melissa told me she felt uncomfortable around her, and Derek told her she was being paranoid and insecure."
The puzzle didn't just fit together; it locked into place with the precision of a bank vault door.
The apartment at The Royce wasn't a corporate tax shelter.
It was a love nest.
May you like
And my sixty-four years of broken knuckles and frozen winter mornings had been paying the rent.
***