Chapter 6 - The Unlocked Diary
The living room felt suffocatingly quiet, save for the low, muffled murmur of Investigator Vance’s voice echoing from the kitchen where Helen was being questioned. Arthur sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa, staring at the braided fringe of the Persian rug. Lily sat beside him, her small legs swinging idly inches above the floor, her pink schoolbag resting squarely between them like a physical barrier.
"Lily," Arthur whispered, turning his head slowly so as not to startle her. "You don't have to be scared anymore. Nobody is ever going to make you clean the floors at night again. Do you understand?"
Lily stopped swinging her legs. She turned her head slowly, her large, pale blue eyes locking onto Arthur’s face with a devastating maturity that no five-year-old should possess.
"Mom says if we tell the truth, the bad men take the house away," Lily said softly, her voice entirely devoid of fear, which somehow made it infinitely more terrifying. "She said you’ll have to live in your car and eat trash from the street because you spent all the money on the secret boxes."
Arthur’s breath hitched in his throat. The "secret boxes." Helen had told her about his financial accounts—the offshore accounts he had set up years ago during a corporate scandal, the ones he thought only he and Helen knew about. Helen had weaponized his own corporate espionage against him, feeding paranoid delusions to a five-year-old child to ensure her absolute silence.
"Lily, your mother was... she wasn't telling you the truth about that," Arthur stammered, feeling the walls of his life closing in. "Daddy made mistakes at work, yes, but we are safe. Nobody is taking our home."
Before Lily could respond, the front zipper of her pink schoolbag gave a faint, metallic hiss.
Arthur froze. Neither he nor Lily had touched the bag. The zipper was moving downward on its own accord, driven by a small, trembling hand from inside the side pocket, or perhaps...
No. The bag was zipped shut when Principal Gable called. It was zipped shut when they sat at the dining table.
"What is that?" Arthur whispered, reaching out a hesitant hand.
Lily looked down at the bag, her expression shifting from deadpan obedience to sudden, acute panic. She lunged forward, her small hands grabbing the fabric of the bag to push it away from her father, but it was too late.
The flap fell open. Instead of school papers, crayons, or watercolor paintings, a thick, leather-bound journal tumbled out onto the sofa cushions. The cover was charred around the edges, as if it had been pulled from an incinerator just moments before being completely destroyed.
Arthur reached out with shaking fingers and picked up the burned journal. He turned it over, and the breath left his lungs in a ragged gasp.
May you like
It wasn't Lily’s handwriting. It was Helen’s handwriting—and the first page was dated three weeks before Lily was even born.
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