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Part 2: The Locked Drawer

The harsh white light of the kitchen felt blinding.

Serafina Blackwood. The name pierced my mind like a surgical needle.

Garrison had only spoken of her a handful of times, usually after he had had too much whiskey. When he proposed to me, he told me he had been married before, but his wife had died five years ago in a horrific accident at Widow’s Bluffs. He had wept, telling me I was the only light that had finally pulled him out of his agonizing grief.

I had thought he was a deeply loyal, beautifully broken man.

But how could a woman who had been dead for five years open a high-yield bank account on the exact day I married her widower?

My heart hammered a frantic, sickening rhythm against my ribs. I forced myself to take a slow, deep breath. I stuffed the ledger deep into the pocket of my jeans, turned off the faucet, and walked back into the living room.

Garrison was sitting on the sofa in his sweatpants, watching a football game, cracking pistachios with his teeth. Arthur had fallen asleep, snoring softly in his chair.

Everything looked perfectly, mundanely normal. But I knew the reality I lived in had fundamentally fractured.

“Dishes done?” Garrison asked, his eyes glued to the TV.

“Yes,” I replied, my voice sounding hollow and metallic to my own ears.

I sat down on the opposite end of the sofa. The roar of the stadium crowd from the television washed over the room, but I couldn’t hear it. I just stared at the profile of my husband’s face—the man I had sworn to build a life with.

He suddenly looked like a stranger wearing a very convincing mask.

“Garrison,” I said, my voice dry. “Do you ever think about Serafina?”

The cracking of pistachios instantly stopped.

Garrison’s entire body went rigid. He slowly turned his head, staring at me with a gaze so intensely sharp it felt physical.

“Why are you bringing her up?” he asked, his voice dropping an octave, laced with a sudden, freezing hostility.

I flinched at the malice in his eyes. “I… I just saw an old photo album today. I was just wondering…”

“It was an accident!” Garrison snapped, rudely cutting me off. “I told you never to bring her up, Brynn! It’s bad luck. It’s in the past!”

He stood up abruptly, throwing the handful of pistachio shells onto the glass coffee table with a harsh, jarring clatter.

“What is the point of talking about a dead woman? Just live your life and stop overthinking pointless garbage!” he yelled, practically spitting the words at me.

I shrank back. I had never seen him like this. He had always been the epitome of gentle consideration. Now, he was like a cornered animal, brimming with erratic, violent aggression.

This overreaction proved one horrifying thing. He was lying. He was terrified.

That night, I claimed I had a migraine and locked myself in the guest room. I lay awake staring at the ceiling, the thick bank ledger burning a hole in my pocket.

The next morning, Garrison knocked on my door, his voice returning to its normal, smooth cadence. “I’m heading to the office, Brynn. Dad’s asleep. Make sure you puree his lunch.”

I didn’t answer. I waited until I heard the heavy front door click shut and the Audi’s engine fade down the street before I crawled out of bed.

I needed more information.

Garrison had a home office at the end of the hall. He kept it strictly off-limits, claiming it held sensitive client data for his logistics firm. I marched straight to it and twisted the knob. Locked.

I knew he kept a spare brass key in a magnetic lockbox under the hallway radiator. I retrieved it, slid it into the lock, and pushed the door open.

The office was meticulously organized. I went straight for the heavy mahogany desk. The bottom drawer was secured with a secondary lock. I used a heavy letter opener to forcefully wedge the latch until the cheap metal snapped.

There were no logistics files inside. There were no client contracts.

There was only a vintage, velvet-lined wooden humidor box.

I opened it. Inside sat a thick stack of glossy photographs.

I picked up the first one. It was a picture of Garrison in his late twenties, smiling brightly on a boat. Nestled into his side was a woman with striking, hauntingly familiar features. She had dark hair, a smattering of freckles, and eyes that crinkled when she smiled.

She was beautiful. But her beauty wasn’t what made the room spin.

It was the fact that looking at her was like looking into a mirror.

She was an absolute, flawless doppelgänger of me.

I flipped the photo over. Written in elegant, looping cursive was a caption: Garrison and Serafina, taken at Widow’s Bluffs.

My hands began to violently shake. The photographs spilled out of my grip, scattering across the desk.

I finally understood the breathless, passionate look in Garrison’s eyes when he first met me at a coffee shop three years ago. I finally understood why he rushed our courtship, why he proposed after only four months.

He didn’t love Brynn Caldwell. He loved a ghost. I was just a convenient, identical replacement part.

A wave of profound, suffocating humiliation washed over me. I wanted to vomit.

I frantically dug through the rest of the box, searching for anything else. At the very bottom lay a photograph that had been violently torn in half.

It showed Garrison and Serafina standing at a gala. But beside them, the third person in the photo had been completely ripped away, leaving only a polished leather oxford shoe and the hem of a dark, tailored suit pant.

Suddenly, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

I jumped out of my skin. I pulled it out. It was a text message from an unknown, untraceable number.

The message was one sentence long.

Don’t touch his things. He’ll kill you.

The words coiled tightly around my windpipe like a venomous snake. I spun around, staring out the office window at the rainy street below. Someone was watching me. The house was bugged, or someone had a sightline into the room.

I frantically shoved the photos back into the humidor, kicked the broken lock mechanism under the desk, and sprinted out of the office, locking the door behind me.

Garrison’s lies. A “dead” wife. An identical replacement. Millions of dollars in a secret account. And now, a death threat from an invisible watcher.

I wasn’t a fool. I knew if I stayed frozen, I would end up like Serafina.

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