“Your father is carrying the weight of the world right now. He needs peace. Please, darling, don’t burden him with unnecessary questions about the house. Let the professionals handle it.”

I kept my expression vacant, but my eyes locked onto her wrist. A diamond-encrusted tennis bracelet sparkled under the fluorescent lights. It was a beautiful piece.

I recognized it immediately, because my mother had photographed that exact bracelet resting intimately on a nightstand beside my father’s engraved Rolex—on the hidden flash drive.

After Arthur and Vanessa finally left, leaving behind a suffocating stench of lies and lilies, Detective Ortiz slipped into the room through the staff entrance.

She unzipped a nondescript black backpack and placed a heavy-duty police laptop on my tray table.

“We decrypted your mother’s drive,” Ortiz said softly. “You were right. The woman was a ghost auditor.”