May 8. Decided I cannot handle this privately anymore. Need to go to the police tomorrow. If someone dangerous has found the property, my pride about keeping the operation informal is no longer a virtue. It is a risk. The women need official protection.
The next page was blank.
George died on May 9.
I sat there holding the journal open and felt the room tilt around me.
“He never made it to the police,” I whispered.
Helena shook her head.
Beneath the journal were the photographs George had mentioned. Grainy but clear enough: Helena in the garden. Clare on the porch. The back of the farmhouse taken from tree cover. A telephoto shot of George unloading groceries from his truck.
Tucked under them was a business card for a private investigation firm in Millbrook.
That was when Clare spoke from the doorway.
“It was Brendan.”
We both turned. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, looking younger than ever and somehow steadier now that the monster had a name in the room.
“He has money,” she said. “He runs a construction business. He hires people. He always said nobody could ever really get away from him if he didn’t want them to.”
I looked from the card to the photographs to the date of the last journal entry.
The sequence arranged itself so cleanly it felt obscene.
A man obsessed with finding his stepdaughter.
A hired investigator.
Weeks of surveillance.
George deciding to go to the police.
George dead the next day on a clear road.
“Do you think Brendan killed him?” I asked.
Helena answered without hesitation.
“Yes.”
The certainty in her voice frightened me more than the possibility itself.
We were still standing in that room, the journal open on the desk between us, when the brick came through the front window.
Glass exploded somewhere down the hall with a crash so violent Clare screamed. We all flinched at once. For one mad second I thought Brendan had come back with a gun.
Instead we found a brick on the living room carpet, wrapped with white paper and a rubber band.
I unwrapped the note with fingers that had started shaking all over again.
STOP HIDING WHAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.
That was the moment something inside me hardened.