Chapter 3 - The Man in the Video
Harrison did not look like the man from the magazine covers.
That was the first thing my mind understood because it could not bear the larger truth yet. His cheeks were sunken. Purple shadows bruised the skin under his eyes. His beard had grown unevenly, and his expensive haircut had become something jagged and neglected. He sat close to the camera in a basement or storage room, concrete wall behind him, one bare bulb flickering somewhere above.
The Harrison who left me had been vain.
This man looked like he had forgotten mirrors existed.
“Sarah,” he said again, voice rough, “listen carefully. Don’t go to Victoria. Don’t go to anyone connected to the Sterling family. And don’t go to the Beverly Hills police first. She has people watching filings, reports, calls—everything.”
I sat frozen on my bed, laptop balanced on my knees, USB drive warm against the port.
He swallowed.
“I know I have no right to ask you for help. I know what I did to you and Chloe. I know I made you carry everything alone. If this is the last thing you ever do for me, protect our daughter.”
Our daughter.
For three years, he had not used those words where I could hear them.
“I thought I married Victoria Sterling,” he continued. “That was the name. That was the family. That was the money. But her real name is Rachel Collins. She was born in Arkansas, and the Sterling identity was built around a dead cousin, old trust paperwork, and enough lawyers paid to look away.”
My breathing shallowed.
Harrison glanced toward something off-camera.
“She doesn’t just marry rich men. She collects access. Accounts. Signatures. Social connections. Medical proxies. Property. If they become inconvenient, they disappear into care homes, private facilities, or worse. I found records. I copied what I could.”
His mouth trembled.
“I was supposed to be easy. Greedy man leaves wife, marries money, signs what she puts in front of him. And I did. God help me, I did. By the time I realized she had emptied half my accounts and used my name to open new ones, I was already locked inside the story she built.”
He leaned closer.
“She’s not done. Her real target is Chloe.”
My blood went cold.
The video glitched.
Footsteps sounded somewhere behind him.
Harrison turned sharply.
“If she knows the doll reached you, she’ll come. Not for me. For what’s inside. There’s another file hidden in—”
The screen went black.
For several seconds, I did not move.
Then I played the video again.
And again.
Not because I doubted what I heard.
Because sometimes terror makes you repeat the same truth until it becomes usable.
At exactly 3:07 a.m., someone pounded on my apartment door.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
The walls shook.
Chloe woke crying in the next room.
My body moved before my fear did. I yanked the USB from the laptop, shoved it into my robe pocket, grabbed my phone, and stepped into the hallway.
A voice from outside the apartment door said, “Open the door. We know you have it.”
Not Harrison.
Not a stranger with the wrong address.
A woman’s voice.
Calm. Irritated.
Like I had inconvenienced her.
I looked through the peephole.
A blonde woman stood beneath the weak hallway light wearing a cream coat and dark glasses though it was the middle of the night. Beside her was a man in a maintenance uniform I had never seen in my building.
Victoria.
Or Rachel.
May you like
Whoever she was, she had found us in Reseda before sunrise.
And she had come for the doll.
