Chapter 3 - THE FIRST CLUE
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sat on the living room sofa, phone in hand, staring at those messages until the sky outside turned pale gray.
*This isn’t over.*
*Don’t think the video is enough.*
I had replied twice more, demanding to know who was messaging me, but there had been nothing. Silence.
By sunrise, I’d had enough. I called the police station and spoke to the officer I’d dealt with the night before.
I told him about the messages.
He took the number, ran it, and called me back ten minutes later with a heavy sigh.
“Burner phone,” he said. “Untraceable. Cash purchase, no ID, activated and used once then likely tossed. It’s untraceable.”
“Someone sent it. Someone who knows about the footage.”
“Or someone who’s just angry on her behalf,” he said. “Ms. Coleman has family. A brother, I believe. He’s got a history.”
I wrote the name down in my mind.
A brother.
I hadn’t even known she had one.
Vanessa had spoken very little about her family. She had always said they were estranged, that she had no one, that we were all she needed.
Another lie.
I hung up and went to check on Noah.
He was awake, sitting up in bed, staring silently at the door. When he saw me, he held out his arms.
I sat beside him and hugged him tight.
“Can I stay home today?” he asked quietly.
“Of course. We’ll stay home as long as you need.”
We spent the morning together. I made pancakes. We watched cartoons. We built towers out of blocks.
But Noah was quiet. Too quiet.
He kept glancing toward the front window, toward the door, as if expecting Vanessa to walk right in.
Around noon, I decided to go through the house.
Vanessa had brought very little with her when she moved in—a suitcase of clothes, a few boxes of personal things, some photographs.
I pulled everything out onto the bedroom floor.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I just knew something wasn’t adding up.
Why would a woman leave a five-year-old child on the side of the road simply because he was crying?
Why would she say he was ruining everything?
And who had sent those messages?
I went through her address book. Her phone was with the police, but she had kept a small leather notebook in her purse.
Most of it was empty—lists of things to buy, appointments, dates I didn’t recognize.
Then, tucked between two pages, I found a folded scrap of paper.
It had been torn from a larger document.
Numbers. Dates. Names.
*July 12 — Payment received. Balance down to 12k.*
*August 3 — Need more. He’s getting impatient.*
*September 1 — Deadline. If not paid, he goes to Adrian.*
My heart skipped a beat.
Adrian.
Me.
I read it again, hands shaking.
*If not paid, he goes to Adrian.*
Vanessa had been in debt. Serious debt. And she had been terrified that whoever was demanding the money would come to me.
That was it. That was the reason.
She hadn’t been trying to teach Noah a lesson. She hadn’t been annoyed by his crying.
She had been desperate. Distracted. Panicked about money.
And in her panic, she had seen my son—not as a child, but as a complication. A problem. Something standing in the way of whatever she was trying to fix.
I flipped the scrap over.
Written on the back, in a different handwriting, was a single name.
JASON.
And beneath it, a phone number.
May you like
I recognized the area code.
It was local.
