I stood motionless in the dim light, my mind spinning. The grief that had weighed me down since the phone call three days ago transformed into something sharp and focused. My uncle’s dry eyes, my stepbrother’s sudden appearance, my cousin’s distracted phone scrolling—it all made terrifying sense now. They weren’t mourning a family member; they were waiting for an inheritance to clear.

I turned to the steel safe beneath the desk, entered the combination written inside the leather journal, and listened to the electronic lock click open. Inside was a compact black hard drive, a set of brass keys to the estate’s side entrance, and a small envelope containing a fresh note written in ink.

“Trust no one tonight,” the note read. “Not even Colin.”

A cold chill ran down my spine. My husband’s strange hesitation at the cemetery returned to my mind with vivid clarity. His sudden offer to accompany me, the subtle shift in his eyes when I refused—was he part of this too, or just an unwitting pawn in Franklin’s game?

I stuffed the hard drive and the brass keys into my coat, locked the safe, and pulled down the metal shutter of Unit 16. As the padlock snapped closed, my phone screen illuminated in the darkness of my pocket. Another text message had arrived from the unknown number.

“They just arrived at the house. You have forty minutes.”

I didn’t waste another second. I stepped into my car, started the engine, and pulled out of the storage facility into the gathering twilight, driving toward the home where my mother’s ghost was about to claim her justice.