As Daniel kissed my forehead goodbye outside my apartment, I felt the folded paper Emily had secretly pressed into my hand.
At 9:42 p.m., I changed into dark clothes, placed two fully charged phones in my bag, activated cloud backup, and texted my colleague Maya my location.
Then I drove back toward the Mercer estate.
Whatever Emily wanted me to witness at ten o’clock, I intended to make sure the truth could never be buried.
PART 2
At 10:04 p.m., I killed my headlights two hundred yards from the gate and walked the rest.
The side gate hung open an inch — not by accident. Emily had left it that way.
I slipped through the hedge line, past the dark pool house, until a shape moved near the garden shed. Emily. Still in the same cardigan. Barefoot on cold grass. The night was warm for October, but she was shivering anyway, arms wrapped around herself like she was holding something in rather than out.
“You came,” she whispered.
“You asked me to.”
She pulled me behind the shed, out of the porch light’s reach. Her hands were shaking harder than they had been at dinner.
“I don’t have long,” she said. “She checks on me every night at ten-thirty.”
“Checks on you how?”
Emily reached into her cardigan pocket and pressed something small and hard into my palm. A prescription bottle, but the label had been peeled off and replaced with a handwritten one: VITAMIN D — TAKE NIGHTLY.
“I stopped swallowing them three nights ago,” she said. “I hide them under my tongue and spit them out after she leaves.”
“What are they?”
“I don’t know. But when I take them, I can’t think straight for hours. My hands shake. I forget what I was saying mid-sentence.” She looked at the house. “Three nights without them, and my head’s finally clear enough to talk.”
I turned the bottle over. No pharmacy label. No lot number. Someone had gone out of their way to make sure it couldn’t be traced.
I’d seen bottles like this before, on a case involving a nursing home two years earlier — medication repackaged, stripped of anything that could tie a dose back to a doctor or a pharmacy or a signature. It was the kind of detail that meant someone had done this before and learned from the first time.
