The first showed a half-melted, red plastic fuel canister abandoned near our basement stairwell—a place where we never stored accelerants. The second zoomed in on deep, fresh pry marks gouged into the main gas valve behind the furnace.

The third was a grainy but undeniable traffic-camera still. It captured my father’s distinctive black sedan speeding away from our affluent, quiet street exactly eleven minutes before the first 911 call had been logged by our neighbor.

“He sat in that chair and told my uniforms he was inside the house fighting the fire,” Ortiz said, her eyes locked onto mine, watching for my break. “He wasn’t, Ellen. He was already gone.”

I stared down at the photographs. The jagged edges of my grief began to crystallize, hardening into something infinitely sharper and vastly more dangerous.

Chapter 2: The Architecture of a Lie

“Why?” The word felt like sandpaper on my vocal cords. “Why would he burn his own life to the ground? Why would he kill us?”

Detective Ortiz leaned back, her expression grim. “We believe it’s the oldest motive in the book. Money. Your mother took out an eight-million-dollar life insurance policy a decade ago. Your father is the sole named beneficiary on the master file. With Hale Development facing quiet rumors of insolvency, eight million tax-free is a hell of a life raft.”