“Like… a mommy who buys you dresses, but also a mommy who makes you bite the elephant?”
My throat felt like it was filled with dry sand. “I think some people have shadows inside them, Lumi. And sometimes those shadows come out when they’re scared or angry. But the shadow isn’t the real person.”
Lumi went to her room and returned clutching her stuffed otter, Ollie. She looked at the toy for a long time, then handed it to me.
“I want you to have him,” she said.
“Lumi, this is your favorite toy. I can’t take him.”
“No,” she insisted, her dark eyes fierce. “Look at his back.”
I turned the otter over. Tucked into the thick fur of the toy’s spine was a tiny, hidden zipper, so small I had never noticed it during our movie marathons. I slid the zipper open.
Inside the cavity of the toy was a small, silver flash drive.
“Mommy was watching movies on her laptop,” Lumi whispered, her voice trembling. “She was crying and drinking the red water. When she went to the bathroom, I saw the little stick in the side. I took it because… because she was looking at me in the video and it was scary.”
I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead. I took the flash drive to my laptop, my hands shaking so badly I struggled to insert it.
When the files loaded, I found a series of video recordings, all dated within the last year. I clicked on the most recent one, dated just a week before our wedding.
The image was grainy, captured from a hidden camera in Lumi’s bedroom. It showed Maris kneeling beside Lumi’s bed. Maris’s face was twisted in a mask of weeping, performative agony.
“Say it again, Lumi,” Maris’s voice came through the speakers, sharp as a whip. “Tell me what he did to you.”
“But Gideon didn’t do anything, Mommy!” Lumi was crying, her small hands clutching the blankets.
“Don’t lie to me!” Maris screamed, grabbing Lumi’s shoulders—the exact location where the bruises had appeared. “I saw him touch your hair! I saw the way he looked at you! All men are monsters, Lumi! They want to take you away from me! Now, tell the camera what he did, or I’ll burn your drawing books. I’ll burn everything you love.”
I watched in horrific fascination as Maris coached her seven-year-old daughter to make a false accusation of sexual abuse against me. She made her practice the words. She made her cry on command. She was building a digital gallows, and I was the one who was supposed to hang.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. Maris hadn’t married me for love. She had married me to be her next victim in an insurance-fueled cycle of destruction.
Chapter 5: The Million-Dollar Ghost
I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the kitchen, the blue light of the laptop reflecting in my eyes as I watched the rest of the videos.
There were dozens of them. Maris had done this before. I found a folder titled “L”, containing videos of Lumi being coached to accuse a previous “stepfather”—a man named Carter Landry.
I immediately called my cousin, Finnegan, a detective with the Portland PD. Finn was the kind of cop who didn’t care about social hierarchies; he only cared about the physics of a crime.
“Gideon? It’s midnight,” Finn’s gravelly voice answered.
“I need you at my house. Now. Bring a forensics kit for electronics.”
Finn arrived twenty minutes later. He sat in my kitchen, his expression going from tired to incandescently angry as he watched the “coaching” videos.
“She’s a predator, Gid,” Finn said, rubbing his eyes. “This isn’t just abuse. This is a high-level scam. She’s using the kid to execute ‘legal’ assassinations of her husbands.”
“There was a mention of a man named Carter Landry,” I said. “Look him up.”
Finn’s fingers flew over his tablet. Three minutes later, he let out a long, low whistle. “Carter Landry. Married Maris Vale in 2018 in Missouri. Reported missing in 2019. Body never found, but he was declared dead after a ‘suspicious’ accidental drowning during a hiking trip. Maris collected a $500,000 life insurance policy.”
The pattern was a jagged line of blood.
The next morning, I did my own digging. I logged into our joint financial portal, searching for anything I might have missed. Hidden in a sub-folder of a sub-folder, I found a newly issued life insurance policy on me.
It was for one million dollars.
