Chapter 2
Not Rodney’s.
A woman’s name.
I read it three times to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.
Then I called my husband. He picked up on the first ring, which he never does.
“Hey, babe, what’s—”
“Who is Colleen Frazier?”
Dead silence.
Not confused silence. Not “who?” silence.
The kind of silence where someone stops breathing because they’ve been caught.
When Rodney finally arrived home two hours later, he walked through the front door and looked at the officer, then at me, then at the bag on the kitchen table.
His face didn’t just change.
It collapsed.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
And what he said next didn’t answer a single one of my questions.
It created forty more.
“You weren’t supposed to be home this week,” he whispered. “None of you were supposed to be here.”
The officer stepped forward. “Sir, we’re going to need you to come with us to—”
“No,” Rodney said, holding up a hand. His eyes locked on mine. “She deserves to hear this first.”
He sat down at our kitchen table—the one where we eat breakfast with our kids—and said five words that split my life into before and after.
“The house isn’t what you think.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a phone I’d never seen.
He unlocked it.
And showed me a photo.
I stared at it for ten seconds. Twenty. My vision blurred. My ears started ringing.
Because the woman in the photo wasn’t a stranger.
And the room in the background wasn’t a storage unit.
It was the basement of our house. The one Rodney told me had been sealed off since before we moved in.
The one he said had a mold problem.
The one I had never once set foot in.
I looked at my husband—at the man I’d shared a bed with for eleven years—and I didn’t recognize a single thing behind his eyes.
Tamra, still sitting outside on the porch, caught my expression through the window.
She mouthed: “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t answer. Because I didn’t know yet.
And honestly? After what I found in that basement the next morning—
I’m still not sure I am.
The woman in the photo was his sister. Colleen Frazier.
But Colleen was dead. She died in a car crash fifteen years ago, when she was eighteen. Rodney had told me the story. He’d gone to her funeral. He had a picture of her on his nightstand.
Yet there she was, on that secret phone, smiling weakly, surrounded by walls I knew were directly beneath my feet.
The police officer, whose name was Mark, cleared his throat.
“Sir, you have to understand the situation here. We found a potentially unauthorized person in your house who then vanished. We found a deadbolt locked from the inside. We have a lot of questions.”
Rodney didn’t look at him. He was still looking at me. His face was pleading. “Just give me five minutes with my wife. Please. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
Mark looked at me, then at Rodney, and then at Tamra, who was now standing in the doorway, looking pale and worried. He must have seen something in our faces that wasn’t criminal. Just broken.
He sighed. He and his partner stepped into the living room, leaving the kitchen door open just enough.
Rodney’s hands were shaking. “Her name is Colleen Frazier because that was her name before our mom remarried. Before she became Colleen Miller.”
“Rodney, she’s dead,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded distant.
“No,” he said, his own voice cracking. “She was supposed to be. Everyone thinks she is. That was the only way to save her.”
He looked toward the stairs, toward his office.
“She’s terrified. The police… She heard Tamra cleaning and she panicked. She went back to her room.”
“Her room?” I asked, my mind refusing to connect the dots.
“My office connects to the old attic crawlspace. I built a staircase down to the basement from there. It’s the only way in or out.”
The sealed-off basement. The office I was never to disturb. The trips he took alone to a “hardware convention” every other month. The unaccounted-for cash withdrawals. It all started clicking into place, but the picture it was forming made no sense.
“Rodney, I don’t understand.”
“Our parents,” he started, then stopped. He meant his mother and his stepfather. The ones he always described as “difficult.”
“They were bad to her, honey. Really bad. After the accident… she wasn’t the same. The doctors said it was trauma, PTSD. She couldn’t be around people. Couldn’t go outside. My mother said she was an embarrassment. She wanted to send her away. To an institution.”
He rubbed his face. “One of those places where they just drug you up and forget about you. Colleen was terrified. So I helped her run away.”
