The cold night air felt like needles against my skin, but it was nothing compared to the ice flooding my veins. I stared into the black plastic trash bag. Nestled between shredded documents and discarded catering boxes was a official-looking document with a gold seal. My name, Valerie Vance, was typed in stark, merciless letters. Next to the box labeled Cause of Death, it was currently blank, but the date stamped on it was tomorrow’s.
“They… they hired someone, Mrs. Valerie,” Maria, the housekeeper, whispered, her voice shaking so violently I could hear her teeth chattering. She had worked for us for three years, a quiet woman I had always treated with kindness, often sending money back to her family in El Salvador. Now, that kindness was the only thing keeping me alive. “I was cleaning Andrew’s study this afternoon. I found the draft of the note. And the certificate. He thinks a lawyer friend in the city is going to file it after ‘the incident’ happens abroad. They aren’t just stealing your life, ma’am. They are erasing you.“
“After the accident, no one must find…” I repeated the words on the handwritten note, my voice a hollow ghost of itself. “Find what, Maria? Find my body?“
“The car,” Maria gasped, looking back at the brightly lit living room window where the laughter had suddenly swelled. “They think you’re boarding a connecting flight in London tomorrow morning. They have someone waiting there, or maybe on the roads in France. If you don’t show up… I don’t know what they will do. But if they see you here now, tonight… you won’t make it to tomorrow.“
Inside the house, the clinking of champagne glasses echoed through the glass pane. Andrew was kissing the pregnant woman again—a woman whose face I now recognized as Chloe, his “brilliant new marketing director” whom he had claimed was just a colleague. My mother-in-law, Eleanor, was radiant, her usual severe face softened by the cruel triumph of a successful trap.
To them, I was already a ghost. A ninety-pound inconvenience bought off with a hundred thousand dollars of blood money, destined to die in a fiery rental car accident on a cliffside in Nice, framed as a unstable, runaway wife fleeing with a mythical lover.
“Valerie?” Andrew’s voice suddenly drifted closer to the window. “Did you hear something outside?“
Maria’s eyes went wide with pure terror. She grabbed my arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “Run,” she hissed. “Go to my car. It’s parked down the service lane. The keys are under the mat. Do not go to a hotel. Do not go to the police yet—Eleanor’s brother is the deputy chief of the district. Go somewhere they will never look.“
I didn’t think. Survival instinct, primal and fierce, took over. Leaving my heavy suitcase hidden beneath the thick hydrangea bushes, I grabbed the heavy leather tote bag containing the $100,000 in cash and fled into the shadows of the estate.
An hour later, I was sitting in the driver’s seat of Maria’s battered 2012 Honda Civic, parked in the darkest corner of a 24-hour Walmart parking lot off Interstate 35. The engine was off. The only illumination came from the sickly green glow of the dashboard clock and the distant, buzzing neon sign of the mega-store.
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