“Knew what?”

He folded the dish towel slowly. “Not tonight. I need to make sure I have everything in order first.”

“Dad.”

“I promise, Alyssa. Soon.”

Three days later, he was dead on his office floor.

The doctor called it a stroke. The police saw no sign of foul play. His clients sent cards. The dental clinic downstairs sent flowers. Sophie flew in from Brussels for the funeral and spent two nights sleeping in my guest room with the light on. After the service, she stood beside me at the cemetery while rain flattened the roses on his casket and whispered, “He called me two days before it happened.”

I turned to her. “What did he say?”

She looked at the mourners gathering beneath black umbrellas. “He asked if anyone had contacted me about blood records.”

“What blood records?”

“I don’t know.” She swallowed hard. “He sounded scared.”

After the funeral, the strange things began.

A black car with tinted windows parked across from my house for hours, then vanished whenever I approached the window. My phone rang from blocked numbers at odd times; when I answered, no one spoke. Twice, I came home and felt that something in the house was wrong, not enough to prove anyone had been inside, but enough that I stood in the living room counting objects like evidence. A drawer not fully closed. A book angled differently on the shelf. The faint smell of unfamiliar cologne in the hallway.

Then there were the emails.

Will you be in office Tuesday?

They came from strange addresses, each one slightly different, each one deleted or bounced when I replied. I assumed spam. Then one appeared in my work inbox, disguised as an internal scheduling note, asking whether I would attend the Tuesday morning risk review on the third floor.

At Henning and Cole Investments, Tuesday risk reviews were routine. I was a senior financial analyst, thirty-three years old, reliable to the point of invisibility. I had never missed a workday unless I had the flu or a fever high enough to make spreadsheets swim. I arrived by eight. I left around six. I ate lunch at my desk more often than not. My life had structure. Structure was how I survived grief.

So yes, I would have been at work that Tuesday.

If Gabriel had not come.

I walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. The house looked ordinary under the warm glow: coffee maker, fruit bowl, laptop bag hanging on the back of a chair, my navy blazer draped over it from the night before. I picked up my phone and stared at it.

I could call my manager. I could say I was sick. I could call the police. I could call Gabriel. I could go next door and demand an explanation. Instead, I opened a text thread with Marianne Blake, my manager, and typed: