Chapter 20 - THE FIFTH PERSON
Two years later, Sunday dinner was loud.
Exactly how I liked it.
Leo was older.
Gaby had finished her paralegal program.
Eleanor House had already helped dozens of families.
Derek was incarcerated.
Mason was serving his sentence.
Brenda had lost her appeals.
Our lives belonged to us again.
After dinner, I went outside for the mail.
Bills.
Advertisements.
Then an envelope.
No stamp.
Someone had placed it in my mailbox by hand.
On the front:
ROBERT HAYES.
I carried it inside.
Gaby watched as I opened it.
There was one photograph.
Old.
Faded.
Five adults stood outside Hayes Electrical almost twenty-five years earlier.
I recognized myself.
Eleanor.
Thomas Miller.
Brenda.
And one man I had never seen before.
“Who is he?” Gaby asked.
“I don't know.”
She turned the photograph over.
There were two handwritten sentences.
BRENDA WASN'T THE ONE WHO CHOSE GABY.
SHE WAS FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS.
The room went silent.
Then a car slowed outside.
A dark sedan.
It stopped directly across from Gaby's home.
Three seconds.
Four.
Then it drove away.
Gaby walked toward the window.
Two years earlier, that would have terrified her.
Now she simply watched.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Are we going to find out who he is?”
I looked at the unknown man in the photograph.
Then I noticed his hand.
A ring.
A strange symbol was engraved into it.
My stomach tightened.
I had seen that symbol before.
On the altered version of my will.
I looked at Gaby.
“Not tonight.”
She nodded.
“Tomorrow?”
I smiled.
“Tomorrow.”
Upstairs, Leo slept peacefully.
Outside, Phoenix settled beneath the desert night.
Brenda had failed.
Derek had failed.
The Millers had taken Gaby's money, her home, her confidence, and nearly her child.
But they hadn't taken her future.
That belonged to her again.
And whatever secret waited behind the fifth man in the photograph would have to face a very different woman than the one I found begging between stopped cars.
I placed the photograph on the table.
Neither Gaby nor I noticed the tiny date printed beneath the fifth man's shoe.
It was taken three years before Thomas Miller ever worked for me.
Which meant Eleanor's warning had been right.
The revenge hadn't started with Brenda.
It hadn't started with Thomas.
And maybe it hadn't started with me either.
Somewhere in Phoenix, someone already knew we had received the photograph.
Someone who had waited more than twenty years for the Miller family to take the blame.
And for the first time since Grand Avenue, I found myself asking the question that would open an entirely new chapter of our lives.
If Brenda Miller had only been following instructions…
Who had been giving them?
May you like
THE END…
FOR NOW.
