Chapter 6 - The Brass Key
The kitchen seemed to tilt slightly under my feet.
Derek shifted Clara carefully in his arms, his eyes fixed on the small brass key resting in the palm of my hand. The metallic weight of it felt suddenly heavy, like a lead sinker dropped straight into the quiet rhythm we had just fought so hard to reclaim.
"El," Derek repeated, his voice dropping into a tense, protective register as he stepped closer to the island. "Whose handwriting is that? Are you telling me your dad left something else behind?"
"That's Arthur Vance’s handwriting," I whispered, tracing the precise, looping strokes of the ink on the paper tag. My father had been a meticulous man—a structural engineer who measured everything twice and trusted nothing to luck. "He wrote this. Two weeks before he died."
"Died of a sudden pulmonary hemorrhage," Derek said, the unspoken implication hanging heavily in the air between us. For months, we had accepted the hospital's diagnosis as standard, tragic fact. A healthy man going to sleep and simply not waking up. But looking at the date on the envelope—just days before he altered the trust to protect my inheritance from my mother and sister—a cold, sharp doubt pierced my chest. "Eleanor, what is Unit 402?"
"A storage facility," I said, my pulse accelerating as the pieces of a much darker puzzle began to snap together. "The address on the flap... it’s Apex Secure Storage off Industrial Parkway. Just past the county line."
Derek looked down at Clara, who stirred softly against his shoulder, letting out a tiny, contented sigh before settling back into a deep sleep. He looked torn, the instinct to protect his newborn daughter battling with the sudden, undeniable need to know the truth.
"It's nearly ten o'clock at night," Derek said, though I could hear the hesitation in his tone. "We can't just drive out to an industrial park with a newborn in the car."
"We aren't taking Clara," I said, my resolve hardening into steel. I slid the brass key and the envelope into the pocket of my cardigan. "My neighbor Leah is still awake; I saw her kitchen light on five minutes ago. She’ll watch her for an hour."
Derek didn't argue. He knew that look on my face. It was the same look I had worn when I walked into the auto showroom to face my mother.
May you like
Ten minutes later, Clara was sleeping soundly in her bassinet at Leah’s house across the street, and Derek’s sedan was cutting a sharp line through the rainy Atlanta darkness, heading straight toward the neon glow of Industrial Parkway.
---
