Divorced, Now Watch Me Rise novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Dark House

Brogan put me behind him before I could take a step into the hall.

"Stay on the porch," he said. "Chief, with me."

His security chief went in first with a flashlight, and two more men followed him.

They took forty minutes.

They opened every closet and the cellar and the crawlspace over the garage, and the house gave up nothing.

The chief came back to the porch and shook his head.

"No forced lock, sir. The keypad log shows the code entered at ten past three."

"Whose?"

"The guest code from the night Miss Coldwell stayed. Nobody deleted it."

Brogan's jaw tightened.

"That's mine," he said. "I should have cleared it months ago."

"Dalton took her phone before she left him," I said. "Or her bag. Or he asked."

"It doesn't matter how."

Upstairs, the old suitcase lay open on the floor of my bedroom, and nothing in it was gone.

Only the brush had been moved.

I stood over it with my hand on my belly and my heart going hard.

"We're leaving tonight," Brogan said. "Hattie's, a hotel, anywhere."

"No."

"Imogen."

"I was put out of one house with a suitcase," I said. "I'm not leaving this one."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he went down and spoke to the chief, and I heard the front door shut and a lock turn.

He came back with the code changed, the cellar door bolted from inside, a man on the front step, a man in the alley, and a police car parked at the curb.

"There is no one in this house," he said.

"Then come to bed."

He stood in the doorway, wary and tired.

"You've had a long day," I said. "You told me you loved me in a print shop. I would like to hear it again where the walls are warm."

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