When Daniel Carter came home nearly three months earlier than anyone expected, he imagined a quiet reunion. He pictured his daughter running into his arms, his wife smiling in surprise, the house warm and peaceful after too many weeks away.
Instead, the silence that greeted him inside the mansion felt wrong from the moment he stepped through the door. The air smelled faintly of dust and fresh paint. The rooms were too still. And within minutes, he would discover something so horrifying it would split his life into a before and after.
Daniel had married Vanessa after years of grief following the death of his first wife. He had wanted to believe he was giving his little girl, Lily, a stable future again. Vanessa was elegant, intelligent, graceful in public, and unusually skilled at making people feel reassured. The city admired them as a polished new family: a wealthy businessman, his poised new wife, and a six-year-old daughter whose whole world revolved around her father.
But beneath that image, something had already begun to rot.