“So what do I do? I cannot just disappear. My documents, my ID, everything burned in the house. I have no money. I have nowhere to go.”
“You have me,” said Catherine. “And you have something James does not know you have.”
“What?”
She smiled. A cold smile that made me see why my father trusted her.
“The truth. And time to prove it. James will return tomorrow. He will pretend to be devastated. He will put on a show for the police and the neighbors. He will look for the bodies. And when he does not find them, he will know something went wrong.”
“Yes.”
“But by then, we will already be ten steps ahead.”
I did not fully understand what she meant. But I was too exhausted to question, too exhausted to think. I could barely keep my eyes open.
“You and the boy will stay here today,” she decided. “There is a small room in the back. It is not much, but it has a bed. Tomorrow we will plan the next steps.”
“Catherine, why are you doing this? Why help this much?”
She stayed quiet for a moment, looking at some point beyond me, lost in some memory.
“Robert saved my life once, a long time ago. When my own husband tried to kill me.”
She returned her gaze to me.
“I know exactly what you are feeling now, Sarah. The shock, the betrayal, the fear. And I promised your father that if you needed me, I would be here. It is a debt I have the pleasure of paying.”
I swallowed the tears that threatened to fall.
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me yet. The game has just begun.”
I slept for maybe three hours, but it seemed like three minutes. I woke up with Leo shaking me, scared, asking where we were. It took me a few seconds to remember. And when I remembered, reality fell on me like a bucket of cold water.
My husband tried to kill me.
It did not matter how many times I repeated that in my head. It still seemed unreal, surreal, as if it were a nightmare I was going to wake up from at any moment. But it was not. And the morning news proved it.
Catherine knocked on the door of the small room at seven.
“Turn on the TV. Channel 5.”
There it was. Fire Destroys House in Luxury Subdivision. Fate of Family Still Unknown. They showed the house, or what was left of it. Just black walls and smoking debris. Firefighters still working, sorting through remains.
And then they showed him.
James, getting out of a taxi in the middle of the confusion with an expression I recognized. The one he used when he rehearsed important speeches in front of the mirror. Calculated concern. Measured horror.
“My wife. My son. For the love of God, someone tell me they were not in there!”
He was screaming at the camera, at the police officers, at anyone who would listen. The reporter explained that he was traveling for work, that he had just landed and had come straight to the scene.
“A desperate husband looking for his missing family,” narrated that deep news anchor voice.
I felt Leo shrink beside me.
“He is lying,” whispered my son. “He is pretending to care.”
And he was. You could see if you looked closely. The way he checked the cameras before collapsing in tears. How his eyes were dry even with his hands covering his face. How he asked the firefighters:
“Did you find the bodies yet?”
With an urgency that was not of someone who has hope. It was of someone who needs confirmation. He wanted to make sure we were dead.
Catherine turned off the television.
“He will look for the bodies all day. When he does not find them, he will start to suspect. We have maybe twenty-four hours before he realizes you escaped. And then… then he will panic. And people in panic make mistakes.”
She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Sarah, I need you to tell me. Do you know the combination to the safe James has in the office?”
I thought for a moment.
“I know it. It is his date of birth. Too obvious, but it works.”
“Does he keep important documents there?”
“I think so. I never paid much attention.”
“We need those documents. Especially if he is stupid enough to have kept something that connects him to the men he hired.”
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