Chapter 1 - THE MONSTER AT THE TABLE
“Daddy, she’s not my new mommy. She’s a monster.”
My four-year-old daughter pointed across the dinner table at my wife.
Vanessa lowered her fork. For one second, nobody moved. Then my brother let out an awkward laugh, and everyone followed him.
“Emma’s had a big day,” Vanessa said. She smiled at me, but her fingers tightened around her water glass.
Emma slid off her chair and came to stand beside mine. She had brought her stuffed rabbit to dinner, something she hadn’t done in months.
“What happened, sweetheart?” I asked.
“She put me where the machines live.”
Vanessa’s smile disappeared. “I asked her to wait in the laundry room while I cleaned up a spill. She was there for five minutes.”
Emma pressed her face into my sleeve.
I wanted Vanessa to be right. We’d married three weeks earlier, and I’d promised Emma we were going to be a family. So after everyone left, I opened the security app on my phone.
At 3:14 that afternoon, Vanessa took Emma by the hand and walked her into the laundry room. She shut the door. She didn’t open it again until 4:09.
For fifty-five minutes, Emma had been alone.
I turned up the sound. At the end of the recording, Vanessa opened the door and said, quietly enough that she must have thought nobody else could hear:
“If you tell your father, I’ll tell him you’re lying. Just like the other little girl.”
I listened twice. Then I went downstairs.
Vanessa was folding a dish towel at the kitchen counter. “You look upset.”
“You have ten minutes to pack.”
Her face hardened. “She made me sound terrible, didn’t she?”
“You did that yourself.”
I called the police. Vanessa grabbed her purse and headed for the front door, but Emma caught my sleeve.
“Daddy,” she whispered, “there’s another camera.”
She led me upstairs and pulled two stuffed animals apart on her shelf. Between them sat a tiny black lens, pointed at her bed.
I had never seen it before.
An hour later, Detective Ruiz examined the mounting tape beneath it.
“This has been here about eleven months,” she said.
I looked toward Vanessa, sitting silent beside the officer in our hallway.
“I met her three weeks ago.”
Ruiz removed a memory card from the camera. On her laptop, the first video opened to a bedroom that wasn’t ours.
A little girl slept under a yellow blanket. Behind her, a woman stepped into view.
Emma leaned against me and whispered, “Daddy, that’s the lady from my dreams.”
May you like
The woman on the screen turned toward the camera.
It was my dead wife.
