“Paid off the second the ink dries,” Ryan said with a smirk that sickened me to my core. “She thinks I’m a successful consultant. She has no clue my firm went bankrupt two years ago.”
The video cut to black. I sat there in the stifling silence of Megan’s office, the breath completely knocked out of me. The man I had stood at the altar waiting for, the man I loved, was a fraud. He didn’t love me; he loved the inheritance my grandfather had left me, an inheritance that was set to activate fully upon my marriage. Claire hadn’t been cold and distant out of jealousy or spite; she had been desperately trying to protect me from a predator, digging into his past while I was blinded by wedding planning.
“Alice,” Megan said softly, placing a hand on my shaking shoulder. “Claire came to me the night before the wedding. She was terrified. She said Ryan had noticed her following him and that he had threatened her. She told me that if anything happened to her, I had to give you this phone.”
“Threatened her?” My voice was a cracked whisper. “Megan, the police said it was an accident. The storm…”
“Claire was an expert driver, Alice. She grew up handling those exact mountain roads,” Megan insisted, her eyes shining with tears. “She called me from her car right before the crash. She said Ryan’s car was behind her on the old highway. She was trying to bypass the storm traffic to get to the church to stop the ceremony. Then the line went dead.”
The room seemed to spin. The grief that had paralyzed me for the past week suddenly morphed into a cold, sharp dread. Claire wasn’t just gone; she had been run off the road because she knew too much. And for the past seven days, I had been mourning her in the arms of the man who had caused her death.
I looked down at the note again. Don’t trust Ryan. “What do I do?” I whispered, looking at Megan.
“You can’t go home and act like nothing is wrong,” Megan said. “If he suspects you know, you could be in danger too. We need to go to the police.”
“No,” I said, a sudden wave of clarity washing over me. “The police already closed the case as a weather-related accident. They didn’t find the car or her body because of the river’s current. If I go to them with just a video of financial fraud, Ryan will deny the rest, destroy evidence, and flee. I need to find proof connecting him to the road that day.”
I thanked Megan, hid the phone deeply within my purse, and walked out into the bright afternoon light. My mind raced. Ryan was currently at the office, or so he said. I drove back to our apartment, my heart hammering against my ribs with every mile. I had to act completely normal. I had to be the grieving, naive bride he expected…
