Chapter 8 - MY FATHER'S SECRET
My father had known Elaine Mercer.
Not socially.
Not casually.
He had been prepared to testify against her.
And then he'd disappeared from the case.
I remembered that year.
I was twenty-three.
My father had called me into his office and said there were some wars money couldn't fix.
Two months later, he died in what police called a highway accident.
For years, I had accepted it.
Now I wondered what else I had accepted because the alternative was more painful.
Tessa stared at the court file.
“Your father could have cleared mine.”
“He tried.”
“But he never testified.”
“Maybe he couldn't.”
She looked at me.
The question sat between us.
Was my father's death connected too?
My attorney reopened the old accident records.
The report claimed brake failure.
The repair shop photographs were missing.
The mechanic who inspected the car had moved overseas.
But one document survived.
An insurance supplement.
Someone had manually cut the rear brake line.
Tessa covered her mouth.
My father hadn't died in an accident.
Twenty-one years ago, someone had murdered Antonio Corvino.
Now the same network was trying to destroy me.
I should have been furious.
Instead, I felt strangely calm.
Because rage without direction had kept me alive for six months.
Now I had direction.
That evening, I resumed therapy.
I hated every second.
The therapist strapped my torso into a standing frame.
My blood pressure dropped.
Sweat broke across my forehead.
Tessa stood beside me.
“Enough,” the therapist said.
“No.”
“Vincent—”
“No.”
My legs couldn't hold me.
But my arms could.
My shoulders could.
My mind could.
I stayed upright twenty seconds longer.
Afterward, Tessa handed me water.
“You're impossible.”
“My father used to say that.”
She smiled.
Then her expression changed.
“My father kept one thing from the old company.”
“What?”
“A hard drive.”
“Where?”
“He told me never to touch it.”
I stared at her.
“Tessa.”
“I know.”
We went to her father's old workshop that night.
Inside a rusted cabinet beneath boxes of electrical parts, we found the drive.
Most files were corrupted.
One wasn't.
A client archive.
Corvino Residence Security Upgrade.
Dated twenty-one years earlier.
Inside was a scanned installation map of my childhood home.
And beside one camera location, my father's handwriting appeared.
May you like
IF I DIE, CHECK CAMERA 4 BACKUP.
Camera 4 had faced the driveway the night he was killed.
