Chapter 5 - THE BROKEN APARTMENT
Agent Grant refused to let me return to my apartment alone.
Two local officers entered first.
Ava and I waited in the hallway while they searched each room.
My front door hung crooked from the frame.
Books covered the floor.
Kitchen drawers had been pulled out.
The mattress had been cut open.
My laptop was gone.
So were three backup drives hidden inside a box beneath my bed.
“They knew exactly what they were looking for,” Ava whispered.
Agent Grant walked out of the bedroom.
“Is anything else missing?”
I examined the room.
Jewelry remained on my dresser.
Cash remained inside a kitchen jar.
The television was untouched.
“They only took my electronics.”
“Were the original Lighthouse files stored on those devices?”
“Some of them.”
“Where are the others?”
I hesitated.
My father had spent my entire life teaching me that trust was weakness.
I hated that his lessons still lived inside me.
Agent Grant noticed.
“You do not have to tell me where they are.”
“Not yet.”
“But I need to know whether they are safe.”
“I think they are.”
Ava bent down near my desk.
“Emily.”
She lifted a small black object from behind the wastebasket.
It was a camera.
Not mine.
Agent Grant placed it inside an evidence bag.
We found two more cameras before leaving the apartment.
One faced my desk.
One faced my bed.
The oldest footage on their memory cards was four months old.
My father had been watching me long before the plagiarism complaint.
An officer entered from the hallway.
“We found something downstairs.”
In the parking garage, he led us to my car.
The driver’s door was unlocked.
A white envelope rested on the seat.
My name was written across the front in my mother’s handwriting.
Inside was a single photograph.
It showed me sitting at my desk, working on Lighthouse.
The photograph had been taken by the camera hidden near my bookshelf.
A message was written on the back.
A good daughter knows when to sacrifice.
Ava looked over my shoulder.
“Your mother left this?”
“I do not know.”
Agent Grant photographed the note.
“Does she have access to your apartment?”
“She had an emergency key.”
A sound came from the far side of the garage.
A metal door closed.
The officers drew their weapons.
“Stay here.”
They searched the garage.
No one was found.
But the security office reported that a black sedan had exited less than a minute earlier.
The vehicle belonged to my mother.
I called her.
She answered on the first ring.
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Your car was outside my apartment.”
Silence.
Then she sighed.
“You need to stop this, Emily.”
“Did you put cameras in my home?”
“Your father was worried about you.”
“He was spying on me.”
“He believed you were becoming unstable.”
“You watched him frame me.”
“I watched him protect our family.”
I closed my eyes.
“Did you leave the photograph?”
“I left you a choice.”
“What choice?”
“Come home tonight.”
“And then?”
“Sign the contract.”
“And if I refuse?”
Her voice became very quiet.
“Then your father will release the medical records.”
I gripped the phone.
“What medical records?”
“The ones proving that you have been mentally unwell for years.”
“I have never been diagnosed with anything.”
“That will not matter when people see the documents.”
The call ended.
I lowered the phone.
Agent Grant had heard everything.
“Can they create false medical records?” she asked.
“They created a false academic history.”
Ava touched my arm.
“Emily, there is something you need to see.”
She opened the university newspaper’s website.
A story had been published twelve minutes earlier.
The headline read:
DISGRACED GRADUATE SUFFERS FROM LONG HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRIC INSTABILITY, FAMILY SOURCES CLAIM.
May you like
Beneath the headline was a photograph of me.
And the article had been written under Ava’s name.
