Chapter 3 - The Woman on the Camera
For a few seconds, all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.
On the nursery recording, Olivia stood beside Sophie’s bed while Vanessa blocked the door.
They were not strangers.
They were arguing.
The camera had no sound.
I looked at Vanessa.
“You told me you had never met her.”
“I told you what I had to tell you.”
That answer hit harder than a denial.
Sophie pressed against my side.
I turned to Malcolm. “Take Sophie upstairs. Stay with her.”
“No.” Sophie grabbed my hand. “I want you.”
I knelt. “I’m not going anywhere. I need five minutes with Vanessa.”
She looked terrified.
“Don’t let her be alone with me again.”
My chest tightened.
“Never.”
When Malcolm and Sophie left, I shut the kitchen door.
Vanessa wiped tears from her cheeks.
“I was trying to protect her.”
“By hurting her?”
“I grabbed her once because she was running toward the stairs.”
“Those bruises are not from once.”
“She fights me every time I tell her Olivia can’t come back.”
I stared at her.
“Why can’t Olivia come back?”
Vanessa looked toward the ceiling as if Sophie might somehow hear us.
“Because Olivia is dangerous.”
I almost laughed.
“That’s your defense?”
“She disappeared for a reason.”
“She was declared dead.”
“I know.”
The words landed between us.
“You know?”
Vanessa’s breathing changed.
I stepped closer.
“How long have you known Olivia was alive?”
“Since before I met you.”
I stopped.
The private investigator had told me Vanessa visited Olivia three weeks before the official death notice.
Now she was admitting the relationship went even further back.
“Who are you?”
She looked at me with something I had never seen in her face before.
Not fear.
Exhaustion.
“I was Olivia’s patient coordinator at Harbor Ridge.”
I knew the name.
A private psychiatric hospital outside Santa Barbara.
My stomach turned.
“Olivia was never admitted there.”
Vanessa said nothing.
I remembered the year before the accident. Olivia had been anxious, sleeping badly, obsessed with company records. My brother Lucas kept telling me she was paranoid.
Then came the crash.
No body was recovered.
Three weeks later, a judge signed the declaration that allowed the death certificate to be issued.
Vanessa crossed the room and opened her purse.
I tensed.
She pulled out a folded photocopy.
“Before you decide I’m the monster, read this.”
It was a psychiatric hold authorization.
Patient: OLIVIA CARTER.
Facility: Harbor Ridge Behavioral Health.
Reason: Acute paranoid episode; risk to self and child.
At the bottom was my signature.
I stared at it.
“That’s fake.”
Vanessa shook her head.
“No.”
“I never signed this.”
“You did.”
“When?”
“Two days before Olivia disappeared.”
I looked at the date.
Something cold moved through me.
I remembered that week.
Or I thought I did.
A board dinner.
An argument with Lucas.
A migraine so bad I had spent a day in bed.
But the forty-eight hours before Olivia’s crash were strangely blank.
Vanessa watched my face.
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
I looked up.
She whispered, “That’s why Olivia is afraid of you.”
I took the hold authorization upstairs and compared the signature against contracts I knew I had signed.
The loops matched.
The pressure marks matched.
Even the ugly slash I used through the letter T matched.
I wanted it to be fake.
It wasn’t.
Sophie stood in the doorway holding her stuffed rabbit.
“Daddy?”
I forced my face to soften.
“Yeah?”
“Did you send Mommy away?”
The question cut deeper than anything Vanessa had said.
“I don’t know what happened yet.”
“That means maybe.”
I had no answer good enough for a six-year-old.
Sophie looked at the paper in my hand.
“Mommy said you signed something when your eyes were sleepy.”
I went still.
“When did she tell you that?”
“Last week.”
“Did she say who made me sleepy?”
Sophie nodded.
Then she pointed downstairs.
At Vanessa.
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