The stranger appeared beside me during the fellowship hour at St. Catherine’s, pressing a small blue box into my hands before I could react. “You’ll need this tonight, Mr.
Grant,” she whispered, her voice urgent and low. “Midnight. Don’t miss it.” Then she vanished into the Sunday crowd like smoke through redwoods, leaving me standing there with my daughter Amber and her husband Rowan, holding something that would shatter what remained of my carefully reconstructed life.
My name is Simon Grant, I’m sixty-seven years old, and exactly one year ago I buried my wife of forty years after a car accident on Highway 101. What I didn’t know that Sunday morning was that I’d buried a lie, and the woman who’d just handed me that blue box was about to prove it. I drove home to my property in the Humboldt County redwoods with the box hidden under my truck seat, telling myself it was probably nothing—maybe someone returning something of Blair’s they’d found, maybe a sympathy gift I was supposed to acknowledge.
The forty-minute drive up the mountain gave me too much time to think about the woman’s face, how she’d known my name, how she’d disappeared so completely that even Amber hadn’t noticed her approach. My daughter had been distracted anyway, talking about the property again, suggesting gently that maybe it was time to consider selling, that fifty acres was too much for one aging man to maintain alone. “Just think about it, Dad,” she’d said in the church parking lot, Rowan’s hand on her shoulder in that practiced gesture of concerned unity they’d perfected.
“We only want what’s best for you. The Cascade Development Group is still interested. The offer’s generous.
You could finally rest, maybe travel like you and Mom always planned.”
I’d nodded noncommittally and driven away, watching them in my rearview mirror as they stood together in the autumn sunlight, looking like the perfect young couple worried about an elderly parent. I didn’t know then that they’d been planning my death for months, that the sympathy in Amber’s voice was covering calculations about inheritance timelines and property liquidation. I didn’t know that my son-in-law had already spent money he expected to extract from my estate, that my daughter had been renting cave systems on my land to drug traffickers for five years.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
