Chapter 2 - THREE SLEEPS
The emergency room doctor examined Ethan for nearly an hour.
Dehydration.
Bruising.
Malnutrition.
A cut behind his right ear.
Pressure marks around one wrist.
None of the injuries were immediately life-threatening.
That was the only good news.
William stood beside the hospital window while the doctor spoke.
His hands remained clenched.
“How did I not see this?”
The doctor did not answer.
Neither did I.
There was no answer that would make him feel better.
Ethan slept beneath a warm blanket.
I sat beside him.
William finally turned toward me.
“Why were you upstairs tonight?”
“I heard crying.”
“You were working the engagement party downstairs.”
“Yes.”
He looked ashamed when he said the next words.
“My engagement party.”
Isabella had been scheduled to announce their wedding date that night.
Nearly two hundred guests had filled Sterling Manor.
Champagne.
A string quartet.
Politicians.
Investors.
Celebrities.
And while everyone celebrated downstairs, a five-year-old boy had been trapped behind a wall upstairs.
“I heard something earlier,” I explained.
“I thought it was pipes.”
“Then I heard it again.”
“So you moved the painting.”
“Yes.”
William looked at me.
“You saved my son.”
“I found him.”
“You saved him.”
Before I could answer, a detective entered.
Her name was Detective Lena Brooks.
She was in her forties, with sharp eyes and the patient voice of someone accustomed to hearing lies.
“Mr. Sterling, we searched the room.”
William straightened.
“And?”
“There’s something you need to see.”
She handed him a phone.
The photographs showed scratches inside the hidden compartment.
Dozens of them.
Some were fresh.
Some looked years old.
Names had been carved into the wood.
ETHAN.
MIA.
LUCAS.
SAM.
There were dates beneath several names.
One date was eight years old.
William stared at it.
“Isabella didn’t live with me eight years ago.”
Detective Brooks nodded.
“Who did?”
William’s expression changed.
“My first wife.”
Ethan’s mother.
Rebecca Sterling had died four years earlier in what police ruled an accidental fall from a balcony at the family's lake house.
William swallowed.
“She discovered that room.”
“How do you know?”
“She hated that painting.”
He looked toward me.
“She kept asking why it couldn’t be moved.”
A terrible thought entered my mind.
“Did Isabella know Rebecca?”
William looked at me.
“No.”
Then he stopped.
“At least, that’s what Isabella told me.”
Detective Brooks took the phone back.
“We haven’t located Isabella.”
William looked shocked.
“She left the property?”
“Security footage shows a black SUV leaving through the service gate four minutes before officers arrived.”
“That gate requires an employee code.”
“Yes.”
“Whose code?”
Brooks hesitated.
“Yours.”
William went silent.
Later that night, Ethan woke screaming.
I reached him before the nurse did.
“It’s okay.”
He grabbed my hand.
“She knows.”
“Who?”
“Isabella.”
“Knows what?”
His eyes filled with fear.
“That I found Mommy’s box.”
William stepped closer.
“What box?”
Ethan looked at his father.
“The one behind the bricks.”
William crouched beside the bed.
“Where is it?”
Ethan whispered something that made William stop breathing.
“I hid it before Isabella caught me.”
May you like
“Where?”
“In Mommy’s grave.”
