I stared at Jessica’s three messages until the words stopped looking like language.
I know what Maya told you.
Come home, Ethan. I can explain everything.
Eight years of marriage sat behind those sentences. Sunday mornings. Mortgage paperwork. Arguments about paint colors. Her cold feet pressed against my legs in bed. The night she held my hand in the emergency room after I cut my palm open rebuilding the deck. Hundreds of ordinary memories suddenly felt like evidence from a crime scene.
Maya reached across the desk. “Don’t answer yet.”
“How does she know I’m here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re my father’s attorney.”
“Yes.”
“So who knows about this office?”
“Plenty of people know where I work. Very few know you’re here right now.”
I looked toward the window. Four floors below us, traffic crawled through downtown Portland beneath a low gray sky. Across the street, people moved beneath umbrellas. Any one of them could have been watching the building.
Maya stood and closed the blinds.
That simple act frightened me more than if she had panicked.
“Does Jessica have access to your phone?” she asked.
“She knows my passcode.”
“Location sharing?”
I took out the phone. Jessica and I had enabled family location years earlier after she once lost her phone during a trip to Seattle. I had forgotten about it because neither of us used it.
My location was still being shared with her.
I disabled it.
Maya watched me. “That may be all this is.”
“May be?”
“She could also know more.”
I picked up the photograph of Victor and the young woman identified as Victoria Morales.
“Is this definitely her?”
“We verified the name change.”
“Jessica Bennett.”
“Victoria Morales became Victoria Bennett when she was twenty-three. She began using Jessica socially several years later.”
“Why Jessica?”
“I don’t know.”
I remembered the story she had told me on our third date. She said her mother loved the name Jessica but her father insisted on something old-fashioned, so she eventually chose the name she preferred.
Even that memory now had edges.
“What about her parents?”
“Her mother died when Victoria was fourteen.”
“And Victor?”
“You were told her father was dead before you met.”
“Yes.”
“That part was true.”
I looked at Maya. “You said Victor died six years ago.”
“He did.”
“But Jessica and I have been married eight.”
Maya nodded.
The implication landed slowly.
For the first two years of our marriage, Victor Morales had still been alive.
I remembered Jessica disappearing for occasional weekends during those years. Conferences. A sick aunt in California. A college friend going through a divorce.
I had never checked.
Why would a husband check?
“Did she see him?”
“We’re trying to establish that.”
My phone rang.
Jessica.
I let it ring.
Then she called again.
“Answer,” Maya said.
I looked at her.
“Put it on speaker.”
I accepted the call.
“Ethan?”
Jessica sounded breathless.
“I’m here.”
“Please come home.”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t something we should do over the phone.”
“What exactly are we doing?”
A pause.
“Talking about who I am.”
Maya’s eyes remained on mine.
“Your name is Victoria Morales.”
Silence.
Not denial.
Not confusion.
Just silence.
Finally Jessica whispered, “Yes.”
Something inside me broke with surprising quietness.
“You knew my mother.”
“No.”
“You knew who she was.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Before I met you.”
I closed my eyes.
Maya scribbled something on a legal pad and turned it toward me.
ASK WHY SHE APPROACHED YOU.
I didn’t need the reminder.
“Did you meet me on purpose?”
Jessica began crying.
I had heard her cry before. At funerals. After miscarrying early in our marriage. When her childhood dog died. Those sounds had always activated something instinctive in me—a need to reach for her.
Now I sat still.
“Jessica.”
“Yes.”
The word barely reached me.
I gripped the edge of Maya’s desk.
“Our first meeting wasn’t an accident?”
“No.”
I remembered it perfectly.
A coffee shop near my old office. She had bumped my table while carrying two drinks. Coffee splashed across a folder of invoices. She apologized, bought me another cup, and joked that destroying paperwork was her way of introducing herself.
I had told that story at our wedding.
Everyone laughed.
She had planned it.
“Why?”
“Come home.”
“No.”
“Ethan, please.”
“Tell me why you chose me.”
“I didn’t choose you the way you think.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I was looking for Arthur.”
My father.
Maya leaned forward.
Jessica continued before I could speak.
“My father spent years looking for something Arthur had. Documents. Recordings. He believed Arthur knew where they were.”
“So you married me to search my father’s house?”
“No.”
“You just admitted you approached me because of him.”
“At first.”
The phrase hit harder than a denial.
At first.
I stood and walked to the other side of the office.
“What happened after that?”
“I fell in love with you.”
I laughed once, without humor.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything right now.”
“Good.”
“But it’s true.”
Maya wrote another question.
WHAT DID VICTOR WANT?
I asked it.
Jessica went quiet.
“Evidence,” she finally said.
“What evidence?”
“That my father stole from the Morales trust.”
My pulse quickened.
“What did he steal?”
“Not money exactly. Control. He moved assets through shell companies, pressured trustees, forged signatures. Elena found out.”
“My mother.”
“Yes.”
The way Jessica said Elena made me stop.
There was no contempt in her voice.
There was shame.
“You knew what Victor did to her?”
“Not when I was young.”
“But later?”
“Yes.”
“And you still helped him.”
“I thought Arthur had manipulated Elena. That was the story I grew up with.”
“So you came after us.”
“I came looking for records.”
“You came looking for my father.”
“Yes.”
“And found me.”
“Yes.”
Maya gestured for me to keep her talking.
“When did Victor send you?”
“He didn’t send me.”
“Don’t lie again.”
“I’m not. He didn’t know I approached you until later.”
That surprised Maya too.
“Then why did you?”
“Because I wanted his approval.”
Jessica’s voice changed. The defensiveness disappeared.
“My whole childhood was about Elena. Even after she vanished, she was there. My father talked about her constantly. How she betrayed the family. How Arthur poisoned her against them. How she stole things that belonged to us.”
“She was his sister.”
“I know.”
“You’re talking like she was an enemy.”
“To him, she was.”
I thought about Elena’s journal.
The maple leaf.
The sketch of my hand.
Yellow boats.
“What changed?”
“Victor got sick.”
“When?”
“About nine years ago.”
A year before Jessica and I married.
“He started talking about unfinished business,” she continued. “He kept boxes of files. I read them. At first I believed they proved everything he had told me.”
“And then?”
“I found contradictions.”
“What kind?”
“Payments to doctors who evaluated Elena. Payments to an investigator who later testified against Arthur. Money transferred on the same dates court motions were filed.”
Maya’s pen stopped.
“Do you still have those records?” I asked.
“No.”
“Convenient.”
“I photographed some.”
“Where?”
Jessica hesitated.
“Not over the phone.”
I almost ended the call.
Then she said, “Your father wasn’t the only person searching for Elena.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“What?”
“Victor searched for her until he died.”
“Because she was alive?”
“Because he thought she might be.”
I looked at Maya.
She was already writing.
WHY?
“Why did he think that?”
“Because someone kept accessing money Elena had hidden.”
“What money?”
“A private account Victor never controlled.”
My heart pounded.
“When was it last accessed?”
Jessica took a breath.
“Three months ago.”
I stopped moving.
My mother would now be in her early sixties.
For most of my life, I had pictured her permanently at the age she disappeared. The possibility that she had grown older somewhere—that she had eaten breakfast, gotten gray hair, watched elections, seen technology change, perhaps even searched my name—was almost impossible to hold in my mind.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jessica.”
“I swear.”
“You’ve had eight years to tell me any of this.”
“I know.”
“Instead you searched my safe.”
“I panicked.”
“Because Dad finally found out who you were.”
“Yes.”
There it was.
Not everything.
But enough.
Maya leaned toward the phone.
“Victoria, this is Maya Sharma.”
Jessica’s breathing stopped for a second.
“Maya.”
“You said you photographed Victor’s records. Where are the photographs?”
“I’ll give them to Ethan.”
“Where?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know who Arthur trusted.”
Maya’s face hardened.
“You’re suggesting someone in his circle is compromised?”
“I’m saying my father didn’t spend thirty years protecting himself by trusting only one person.”
A knock sounded somewhere on Jessica’s end of the call.
She stopped speaking.
“Jessica?”
Nothing.
Another knock.
Then a man’s voice, muffled by distance.
Jessica whispered something I couldn’t hear.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Ethan, don’t come home.”
Maya stood.
“What changed?” she demanded.
Jessica ignored her.
“Ethan, listen carefully. Don’t go to Arthur’s house either.”
“Who is there?”
The line went dead.
I called back.
Straight to voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Maya was already dialing another number.
“Police?”
“Yes.”
I grabbed my coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“She just told you not to.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She may also have spent eight years deceiving you.”
“And someone may be at my house.”
Maya blocked the door.
“If you walk into something without knowing who’s there, you help nobody.”
I stared at her.
Then my phone vibrated.
Not Jessica.
A notification from our home security system.
FRONT DOOR OPENED.
Three seconds later:
OFFICE WINDOW SENSOR TRIGGERED.
Then:
SYSTEM DISARMED.
Someone had entered my house using the alarm code.
Only three people knew that code.
Jessica.
Me.
And my father.
Dad was lying in intensive care.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: Someone Entered My House With Our Alarm Code, and Jessica Left Behind the First Evidence Against Her Own Father
My Father Had Never Asked Me for Money Until He Appeared at My Door With a Deadline
Part 5 of 35
