Chapter 4 - The Other Life
The words on the yellowed journal page seemed to blur and shift under the harsh glare of the overhead bulb.
Elena.
I sank down onto a plastic storage bin, the hard plastic biting through my jeans, but I didn't feel it. My mind was racing backward through the years, tearing apart every memory I had of how Scott and I met, how we courted, and how we built our life together.
When Scott and I met at a mutual friend’s New Year's Eve party, he told me he was single, living in a downtown apartment, and recovering from a painful breakup that had ended a long-term relationship. He had been charming, attentive, and deeply vulnerable about how much he wanted a family.
According to this journal, however, four years ago—long after we were supposedly exclusive—Scott was maintaining a house in Oakridge with a woman named Elena, funding a startup with money he had stolen from a wedding fund, and spinning elaborate lies about municipal permits.
I turned the page, my fingers shaking.
May 22: Elena thinks we're getting married in June. The venue deposit is non-refundable, but the seed money from the new investors hasn't cleared. I told her my mother fell ill so we have to postpone. She cried for an hour. I hate doing this to her, but she doesn't understand the pressure I'm under. If the tech pitch fails, I lose everything.
I flipped further, skipping months ahead. The tone of the entries shifted. The excuses grew thinner, the lies more tangled.
November 3: Met Lauren at the firm holiday mixer. She’s sweet, grounded, and has a steady job in corporate compliance. Unlike Elena, she doesn't ask hard questions about money. She thinks I'm between projects right now. It's refreshing to be around someone who isn't constantly auditing my life.
The room seemed to tilt.
I wasn't Scott's great love story. I wasn't the woman he had chosen after healing from a broken heart. I was a soft landing spot. I was a steady paycheck, a compliant partner, and a comfortable roof over his head while his primary life with Elena apparently fractured and splintered behind the scenes.
Except... if Elena existed four years ago, what happened to her? Why were her clothes, her family portraits, and her high-end baby gear sitting in a neglected storage unit on the industrial side of town?
I stood up abruptly, clutching the journal to my chest like a shield, and began tearing through the remaining boxes in the unit.
If Elena was out of the picture, when did she leave? And why was her stuff here instead of destroyed or returned?
I ripped open a cardboard box marked Kitchenware. Inside were wedding china plates, silver-plated serving trays, and a silver photo frame. I pulled the frame out. The photo inside was intact: Scott and Elena cutting a tiered wedding cake, both of them laughing, surrounded by family members I had never met in my life.
The date engraved on the silver plaque at the base of the frame read: June 18, four years ago.
They had gotten married. Despite the journal entry worrying about postponed weddings, they had gone through with it.
Which meant Scott wasn't just a man who had hidden a failed business or a past relationship.
Scott was a bigamist. Or worse—he had maintained a parallel marriage right up until the moment he met me, or perhaps even overlapping with our own wedding two years later.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, shattering the quiet of the storage unit.
I pulled it out, expecting another frantic text or call from Scott.
Instead, it was a notification from an unknown email address that had somehow bypassed my primary filter and landed in my spam folder. The subject line was chillingly simple:
Ask Scott about what happened to Elena's inheritance.
My thumb hovered over the screen, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Before I could tap to open the message, my phone screen flashed with an incoming call. The caller ID wasn't a number. It displayed a name: Brandon.
I answered immediately, bringing the phone to my ear.
"Lauren," Brandon's voice came through, sounding tense, rushed, and entirely devoid of his usual calm paramedic demeanor. "Don't look at anything else in that storage unit. Get out of there right now."
"Brandon, what are you talking about?" I demanded, my voice shaking. "I found the journal. I found Elena's things. Scott was married to her—"
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"Lauren, listen to me," Brandon interrupted, his voice dropping to a harsh, urgent whisper. "Scott didn't just leave Elena. Two years ago, right around the time you and Scott got serious, Elena filed a missing persons report with the downtown precinct. And Scott was the last person seen with her."
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