Chapter 6 - The Paper Trail
I didn't scream. I didn't hit him.
Some deep, ancient instinct buried deep within my survival mechanism took over, locking down my terror and replacing it with a cold, blinding clarity.
I backed down the porch steps, step by step, keeping my eyes fixed on my father's face until he swung the white door shut and locked the deadbolt.
I walked back across the snowy street, climbed into my station wagon, and locked the doors.
My hands were shaking so violently I couldn't get the key into the ignition on the first two tries. When the engine finally roared to life, I turned the heater up to high, leaning my head against the steering wheel as sob after heavy sob tore through my chest.
They were trying to take my daughters.
They hadn't locked the door because they didn't care; they had locked the door because they wanted them found in the cold. They needed the police report. They needed the medical emergency. They needed the proof of 'maternal abandonment' to make their custody petition bulletproof in front of a family court judge.
I pulled my phone out and opened my call log.
My stomach dropped into a dark abyss.
The call I had placed to my mother at 7:15 PM—the call where she had coaxed me to bring the girls over—was gone.
Not just unrecorded—the entire entry between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM had been wiped from my phone's local storage.
My father was an IT security consultant for the regional bank network. He had spent twenty-five years managing remote cloud servers and digital infrastructure. Accessing my shared family mobile account and wiping a remote call log from my carrier dashboard was something he could do in four clicks from his home office laptop.
"Think, Clara. Think," I whispered to myself, pressing my cold palms against my eyes.
What hadn't he been able to wipe?
May you like
The physical world.
I threw the car into drive and sped away from Elm Lane, heading straight toward 4th Street—toward the old, dilapidated brick building that had once housed my mother's antique business.
