Chapter 3 - THE LOCKED OFFICE

I did not go directly home.

That was what Richard expected.

Instead, I took a taxi to the downtown office of Maya Collins, the attorney who had handled my mother’s estate six years earlier.

Maya listened without interrupting.

She examined the photographs from the airport.

She studied the forged petition.

Then she asked me a question I had been avoiding.

“Do you believe the affair is connected to the business?”

Daniel was the public face of Bennett Surgical Partners.

He performed the surgeries.

He appeared at charity events.

He gave interviews.

He accepted awards.

But the practice had been built with money from my mother’s estate.

I had created its financial systems.

I had negotiated its first hospital contracts.

I had worked without salary for three years because Daniel promised we were building something for our family.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“But Richard told Daniel not to let me reach the house first.”

Maya closed the office door.

“Then we assume they’re hiding more than an affair.”

She instructed me not to empty accounts or destroy property.

She told me to preserve records.

She also told me not to return home alone.

An hour later, Maya and a private investigator named Elias Grant followed me into the Bennett residence.

The house felt unfamiliar.

Daniel’s shoes were still beside the front door.

His coffee cup remained in the sink.

Our wedding photograph hung above the fireplace.

Nothing looked different.

That was the cruelest part.

A life could collapse while every object remained exactly where it had been.

We went upstairs to Daniel’s office.

The door was locked.

It had never been locked before.

Elias examined the frame.

“The lock was installed recently.”

I remembered Daniel complaining about hospital files that had to remain confidential.

I had believed him.

Maya called a locksmith.

Inside, the office smelled of cedar and Daniel’s expensive cologne.

His desk had been cleared.

The filing cabinets were empty.

The computer was gone.

Someone had prepared for this day.

Elias searched the shelves.

I opened the cabinet behind Daniel’s medical textbooks.

At the back sat a small black safe.

My anniversary date did not open it.

Neither did Sophie’s birthday.

Then I entered the date Daniel and Claire had first traveled together, according to the earliest hotel receipt I had found in our credit card statements.

The safe clicked.

Inside were two passports.

One belonged to Daniel.

The other belonged to Claire Morgan.

There was also a second phone, several flash drives, and a property deed for a lake house in Wisconsin.

The deed listed the owners as Daniel Bennett and Claire Morgan.

The purchase date was fourteen months earlier.

Maya lifted another document from the safe.

It was a life insurance policy worth five million dollars.

Daniel was the insured person.

Claire was the beneficiary.

Then Elias found a second policy beneath it.

This one was on my life.

Daniel was the beneficiary.

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The policy had been issued three months earlier.

At the bottom of the application was another perfect copy of my signature.