“She’ll get up,” my father said, pulling the curtains shut after shoving me through our second-story window on Christmas Eve. I lay in the Alaskan snow, ribs broken, fingers going numb, while he returned to dinner and asked for pecan pie. My stepmother told the guests I was “being dramatic.” None of them noticed Lily’s phone was still recording everything....

Six months later, the Alaskan summer had transformed the spruce forests into an emerald paradise. Wild lupines bloomed along the mountain gravel road leading up to the house.

I pulled my truck into the driveway of the Carver estate. The yellow crime scene tape was long gone. Denise had taken a plea deal for five years probation and relocated to Florida in disgrace; Lily had abandoned her social media channels entirely after public backlash, moving to Los Angeles to live in anonymity. Arthur sat in the maximum-security wing of Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, awaiting a trial date that would almost certainly see him spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.

The house belonged to me now.

I walked up the front steps, carrying a toolbox and a ring of keys. My wrist was healed; the physical therapy had worked wonders, and my hospital badge from the emergency department sat proudly in my glove compartment, ready for my return to work next month.

I unlocked the front door and pushed it open.

The grand foyer was quiet, stripped of Arthur's pretentious hunting trophies and Denise's ostentatious holiday decor. It was clean, echoing with the promise of a fresh start.

I walked upstairs toward my mother's old studio at the end of the hall—the room Arthur had kept padlocked for twenty years, claiming it was merely structural storage. With a heavy crowbar from my toolbox, I wedged the metal edge into the deadbolt frame and heaved with all my strength.

With a sharp splintering of wood, the heavy oak door popped open.

Dust motes danced in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the arched stained glass. The room was untouched, preserved like a museum from the day my mother passed away.

In the center of the room, sitting atop an antique mahogany drafting table, was a steel safe that had been drilled open from the back decades ago, its door slightly ajar. Tucked inside the iron safe wasn't cash, and it wasn't stock certificates.

It was an unsealed, handwritten letter dated the week before my mother's suspicious death twenty-two years ago, addressed directly to me.

Next to the letter sat an unfamiliar audio cassette tape with my mother’s handwriting across the label: