My husband threw me off a mountain for a $50 million payout and reported me dead before rescuers even arrived—so when they found me alive, I begged them not to tell him and let him plan my funeral instead

Chapter 11

The next morning, Vanessa Voss asked for another interview — and this time, she asked to speak to me.

Holly relayed the request with her usual careful neutrality. “She asked whether we’d found you. Again. I didn’t tell her anything.”

“What does she want?”

“She says Derek lied to her.”

I heard the sentence coming before I understood it, and I sat with the impossible shape of it for a long moment. Vanessa Voss wanted me to believe she hadn’t known. That she’d been used. That the woman who stood beside my husband at my memorial service, close enough to look practiced, had been another of his victims.

It was easier to believe she’d known everything. Two villains, one plan, one number cut down the middle. Simple.

But simple explanations had been failing me in every direction lately.

“Do you believe her?” I asked Holly.

“I believe her devices will tell us,” Holly said, “and she’s agreed to hand them over voluntarily.”

The meeting took place at a field office thirty miles from the cottage. I was not in the room — watching Vanessa through a window from a hallway, sitting in a chair that faced a closed door, feeling the hours stretch like rubber. Mom came with me under protest. Owen texted twice, things like still snowing up here and the coffee at this gas station is a crime, which I understood to mean he was thinking about us.

Holly came out at the end of the second hour, and her face had a new gravity on it.

“Vanessa,” I said. “What did she say?”

“Mostly what she’s been saying: the affair began seven months ago, after the insurance increase. She knew about your father’s trust — because she’d worked at the firm and knew the Voss name meant something to your family.” Holly paused. “She says she never told Derek about the trust.”

“Why would I believe that?”

“You shouldn’t believe anything yet. But listen to the rest.” She sat across from me. “Vanessa says Derek started asking her months ago about life insurance structures. Estate planning, she says — ‘for the baby.’ She thought he already knew about your father’s assets. She’d assumed your family had told him.”

“The insurance application mentioned the trust. Someone knew about it.”

“Yes. Someone on paper.” Holly held my gaze. “She also brought us something. An email from your father’s archived account — sent four months after his death, before she ever met Derek. One sentence: The trust arrangement has changed. Mrs. Marsh’s spouse is now an eligible beneficiary upon her death.”

The plastic chair bit into my back. “That’s not from Dad. Dad was dead.”

“We know. The email was fabricated. The question is who sent it.”

“And she believed it?”

“She says she did at first. The sender address matched your father’s archived account — the account that someone had quietly unlocked. She assumed Winston’s office had managed it.” Holly’s voice dropped. “And she forwarded it to Derek the same day.”

The pieces moved again, rearranging themselves into a shape I didn’t want to look at directly. Vanessa had known about the trust. Vanessa had received a fake email that made the trust look inheritable. Vanessa had told Derek. And Derek had then decided, in the weeks that followed — per the timing the investigators were building — that his wife and unborn child were worth more broken than whole.

“Does she understand what her email started?” My voice came out scraped dry.

“She says she’s beginning to.” Holly was quiet for a moment. “She also says she wants to testify against him, Elena. Fully. Without immunity. She says if you’ll hear it, she’ll tell the court everything — starting with the kind of man Derek was when they met, and ending with the kind of man he became.”

It sat between us, this impossible offer from a woman whose hands were not clean.

“I don’t have to decide anything today,” I said finally.

“No,” Holly agreed. “That’s the mercy of it.”

But I lay awake that night anyway, with Miles breathing against my chest and the moon laying a pale path across the cottage floor, and I thought about my father. The photograph of the two men at the unfinished building. The bridge he’d built and never crossed. The eight million dollars sitting in a promise, waiting for a daughter to make a choice her old friend had never been able to make.

Miles stirred. His small fingers opened and closed against my shirt.

“She wanted to be seen,” I whispered to the dark. “She wanted him to believe she mattered, so she gave him a lie that made him certain. And certainty,” I said, quoting my father’s letter back to the ceiling, “shows what people are willing to choose when uncertainty disappears.”

I held my son until his breathing evened.

And somewhere in a house across the state, a man was unlocking a walnut box.