But my mind was sharp.
During the day, I wandered the house in an oversized robe, hair unbrushed, eyes empty, muttering when Brooke was close enough to hear.
At night, I became myself again.
Sitting in my closet, hiding my laptop glow beneath a blanket, I searched. Ryan had wiped his laptop and smashed his old phone, claiming he had done it in grief. But he didn’t know the smart-home server I had installed for the nursery cameras stored thirty days of network traffic, router pings, and voice-command history.
Four sleepless nights later, I found it.
Ava and Jack’s life insurance policies had been quietly increased from fifty thousand dollars each to two million dollars each.
The change was made twelve days before the crash.
The authorization used my digital signature.
But the IP log didn’t match my computer.
It matched Brooke’s silver laptop in the guest room.
Then I found the money trail.
An offshore shell company in the Cayman Islands had wired forty thousand dollars to a local mechanic named Travis.
Travis was Ryan’s estranged cousin. He was drowning in gambling debt. He was also the mechanic who had installed four new tires on our family van two days before the crash.
My children hadn’t died in an accident.
They had been murdered for four million dollars.
