Daniel Whitmore stared at the boy as the cemetery seemed to disappear around them. The pastor had stopped speaking. The mourners stood motionless beneath their umbrellas. For the first time in his life, Daniel felt something stronger than grief: doubt.
“What’s your name?” Daniel asked, his voice unsteady.
“Marcus,” the boy said. Rainwater dripped from his hair onto the coffin. “Emily told me that if anything happened to her, I had to find you and say three words.”
Daniel’s breath caught. “What words?”
Marcus looked him straight in the eye. “Check the music box.”
Daniel staggered backward.
When Emily was eight years old, she had owned a silver music box that played her favorite lullaby. Inside, hidden beneath the velvet lining, Daniel had tucked away a handwritten note for her after her mother died. No one knew about it except the two of them.
No one.
Daniel snapped the coffin shut. “Stop the funeral.”
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
Within an hour, Daniel, Marcus, and his private investigator were standing inside the burned remains of Emily’s apartment. The police had declared the site fully processed, but Daniel now noticed things he had ignored through grief.
The silver music box sat on a half-collapsed shelf.
Its exterior was scorched, but inside, the hidden compartment remained intact.
There was a note.
Not the one Daniel had written years ago.
A new one.
Three shaky lines in Emily’s handwriting:
Dad, they lied to you. I escaped the fire. Don’t trust Victor. He knows where I am.
Daniel’s hands trembled.
Victor Kane was his business partner.
His closest friend for twenty years.
The man standing beside him at the funeral only an hour earlier.
Marcus stepped closer. “I heard two men talking near the subway station,” he whispered. “One of them said if Emily talked, everything would be over.”
Daniel folded the note with shaking fingers, his eyes darkening with a determination Marcus had never seen before.
His daughter was alive.
And the man he trusted most might be the reason she was hiding.
Daniel turned to his investigator.
“Find Victor.”
Then he looked down at Marcus.
“If you helped save my daughter,” he said, his voice breaking, “you’ll never be alone again.”
But across town, in a locked room with the curtains drawn, Emily Whitmore heard footsteps approaching her door.
And this time, they were not friendly.
