Chapter 3 - What Our Father Left Behind
Uncle Alan appeared on a hospital tablet at 6:12 the next morning.
For three years, I had imagined what I would say if I ever saw him again.
Why did you stop calling?
Why did you leave us?
Did Dad mean so little to you?
Did we?
When his face appeared on the screen, none of those questions came out.
I just stared.
He looked older.
More gray in his hair.
More lines around his eyes.
Still the same crooked nose from when he broke it playing college football.
“Faye?”
His voice cracked.
I hated myself for recognizing it instantly.
“Hi.”
Then Chloe leaned into the camera.
Alan covered his mouth.
“Oh, God.”
Chloe started crying.
So did he.
I didn’t.
Not at first.
I was too angry.
“You stopped calling,” I said.
His expression changed.
“What?”
“You stopped calling us.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Faye, I called every week.”
“Mom said you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Then where were you?”
His confusion became horror.
“I sent emails. Letters. Birthday cards.”
“We got nothing.”
He closed his eyes.
For several seconds, he didn’t speak.
Then he said, “I knew something was wrong.”
That angered me more.
“You knew?”
“Not this.”
“You knew something and did nothing?”
“I tried.”
“That’s what everybody says.”
Chloe touched my wrist.
I pulled away.
Alan leaned closer to the camera.
“Your mother changed numbers. Then the old email addresses bounced. Edric told me you girls didn’t want contact.”
I laughed bitterly.
“And you believed him?”
“No. That’s why I kept trying.”
He disappeared from view for a moment, then returned holding his phone.
“I have copies.”
Emails.
Messages.
Returned packages.
Screenshots.
Even a letter Edric had sent telling Alan to “respect the girls’ wishes” and stop interfering.
I stared at the screen.
Edric had built the wall years earlier than I understood.
Alan’s eyes were red.
“I should have come home.”
“You were deployed.”
“I could have done more.”
That answer disarmed me.
He didn’t defend himself.
He didn’t say it wasn’t his fault.
He simply accepted that he wished he had done more.
Chloe asked quietly, “Why were you listed on Dad’s cloud account?”
Alan looked at her.
“Because David didn’t trust one point of failure.”
That was such a Dad sentence I nearly laughed.
Alan continued.
“Your father was careful. Annoyingly careful.”
“What did he put there?”
“I don’t know everything.”
“You had access.”
“Recovery access. Not full access.”
“Why?”
“Because he was working on something before he died.”
Detective Ramirez, standing nearby, stepped closer.
“What kind of work?”
Alan’s face became serious.
“He suspected someone was trying to manipulate company holdings connected to his estate.”
My pulse quickened.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Edric?”
Alan shook his head.
“David died before Brenda met Edric.”
That mattered.
Maybe too much.
“Then who?”
“He never gave me a name.”
Ramirez asked, “Was David’s death investigated?”
“Yes. Car accident.”
“Any suspicion of foul play?”
Alan’s expression hardened.
“No evidence of it.”
I was grateful he said that immediately.
The truth was already complicated enough.
I didn’t need some impossible conspiracy.
Alan continued.
“But before he died, David was worried about the structure of the trust. He thought certain people might pressure Brenda to access it.”
“Certain people?”
“He never said.”
I remembered Edric asking our mother when the trust matured.
The shares are worth something.
I said, “Maybe he didn’t need to know Edric specifically.”
Alan nodded slowly.
“Exactly.”
Dad had protected us from a type of person.
Not a name.
Someone who saw family money as opportunity.
Someone who thought eighteen-year-old girls could be controlled.
Someone like Edric.
Police obtained authorization to search Edric’s office later that morning.
The missing phone was found inside a locked desk drawer.
Edric denied knowing how it got there.
His attorney called the entire search “a misunderstanding.”
Officer Ramirez called it “useful.”
The phone itself had been partially wiped.
But Dad’s automatic uploads had already done their work.
Technology analysts recovered enough metadata to show that someone had attempted deletion shortly after the device arrived at Edric’s office.
That didn’t prove Edric had done it.
But it made his story harder.
Then the cloud archive opened.
The first recording investigators played was not violent.
That was almost worse.
Edric’s voice came through clearly.
Calm.
Measured.
Brenda sounded tired.
“You need to stop asking me about it.”
“I’m trying to protect this family.”
“It belongs to the girls.”
“They’re minors.”
“For six more months.”
“Then we need signatures.”
“They won’t sign anything.”
“They will if they understand what’s at stake.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they live in my house.”
There was silence.
Then my mother said, “Don’t.”
Edric responded, “I didn’t say anything.”
That sentence became important later.
I didn’t say anything.
It showed how he operated.
Implication.
Pressure.
Fear without explicit threats.
Another recording captured him telling Brenda to block Alan’s number.
Another captured him asking about Dad’s company shares.
Another had him saying, “Once they turn eighteen, leverage disappears unless we establish incapacity first.”
Detective Wells paused that recording.
“What did he mean by incapacity?”
I knew.
“He wanted people to think we were unstable.”
Ramirez nodded.
“He’d been telling your school that.”
Chloe’s face went pale.
“If we were declared mentally incompetent…”
“He might have tried to influence who controlled the trust,” Wells said carefully.
The realization hit me physically.
The punishments.
The stories about us being unstable.
The pressure on Brenda.
The isolation.
Maybe Edric enjoyed control for its own sake.
I believed he did.
But there was also strategy.
He wanted a paper trail where we looked unreliable.
And he wanted access to money once we turned eighteen.
I thought of every time he provoked Chloe until she screamed.
Every time he stood outside my room waiting for me to argue.
Every time he told teachers we were “acting out.”
He had been manufacturing a version of us.
Not just victims.
Future witnesses nobody would believe.
A social worker from our school was interviewed that afternoon.
She confirmed Edric had repeatedly requested meetings about our “behavior.”
He described me as cold.
Chloe as unstable.
Brenda sat beside him every time.
Never contradicted him.
Police also contacted our neighbor, Mrs. Alvarez.
She remembered hearing Edric describe us as “difficult girls.”
But she remembered something else.
One night, months earlier, Chloe had appeared on her porch without shoes.
I stared at Chloe.
“You never told me.”
She looked down.
“I was going to ask for help.”
“What happened?”
“Edric came outside.”
Mrs. Alvarez said Edric laughed, wrapped his coat around Chloe, and told her she had sleepwalked after a nightmare.
He looked so concerned that Mrs. Alvarez believed him.
Chloe whispered, “I went back inside.”
I squeezed her hand.
“You tried.”
That afternoon, Uncle Alan arrived in the United States.
The military had approved emergency leave.
He drove directly from the airport to the hospital.
When he walked into the room, Chloe stood too fast.
She nearly fell.
Alan caught her.
Then he hugged her as if he was afraid she might disappear.
I stayed by the window.
He looked at me.
“Can I?”
I didn’t understand at first.
Then I realized he was asking permission to hug me.
That small question broke something open inside me.
I nodded.
He held me.
I cried into his jacket.
Not because everything was okay.
Because it wasn’t.
Because somebody had finally come when we needed them.
Later, after Chloe fell asleep, Alan sat beside me.
“There’s something I need to tell you about your dad.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Two weeks before the accident, he made me promise something.”
“What?”
“If anything happened to him, I was supposed to make sure you girls knew the trust was yours.”
“I know that.”
“No. There’s more.”
He leaned forward.
“David said the money wasn’t the important part.”
“That sounds like him.”
“He said the important part was control.”
I froze.
Alan continued.
“He told me, ‘If someone ever tries to make the girls believe they need permission to live their own lives, remind them I built this so they wouldn’t.’”
My throat tightened.
Dad had understood something years before Edric arrived.
Not Edric.
The possibility of an Edric.
Alan reached into his bag.
“There’s another thing.”
He handed me an envelope.
My name was written across the front in Dad’s handwriting.
FAYE.
There was another.
CHLOE.
I stared at them.
“Where did you get these?”
“David gave them to me.”
“When?”
“Before he died.”
“Why didn’t you send them?”
“He told me not to.”
“Until when?”
“Your eighteenth birthday.”
“That’s months away.”
“I know.”
“Then why bring them now?”
“Because police found a third envelope in the archive instructions.”
My heart started pounding.
“What did it say?”
Alan swallowed.
“It said if anyone attempted to interfere with the trust before you turned eighteen, I was supposed to open mine.”
He took out a third envelope.
ALAN.
The seal was already broken.
“You opened it?”
“On the flight.”
“What was inside?”
He pulled out a single sheet of paper.
Not emotional.
Not sentimental.
Numbers.
Company names.
Account identifiers.
Transaction dates.
Dad’s world.
Alan gave it to me.
I couldn’t understand most of it.
“What is this?”
“A warning.”
“About what?”
“David believed someone was trying to acquire his company shares indirectly after his death.”
Ramirez, who had entered quietly, looked over my shoulder.
“Through whom?”
Alan pointed at one company name.
KAIN RIDGE ADVISORY LLC.
I frowned.
“Kain?”
“No e,” Alan said. “K-A-I-N.”
That was too close to be coincidence.
Edric Kaine.
Kaine with an e.
The company had been formed four years before Dad died.
Long before Edric met Brenda.
I looked at Alan.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Ramirez took the document.
“We need to verify this.”
My hands started shaking.
Edric always claimed he met my mother at a charity fundraiser two years after Dad died.
Maybe that was true.
Maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe the company name meant nothing.
But another line on the page made my blood turn cold.
A contact name.
E. KAINE.
I stared at it.
Dad had written one note beside it.
WATCH FOR PROXY ACCESS.
I whispered, “He knew.”
Alan shook his head.
“Maybe he knew a name. Maybe not the man.”
Ramirez looked toward the door.
“This changes things.”
I thought the recordings were the trap closing around Edric.
I was wrong.
May you like
The real trap had been built years before we ever met him.
And our father had left the first piece waiting for us.
