Chapter 5 - The Phantom of the Past
Rebecca. To the rest of the world, Rebecca was a tragedy—a tragic memory buried beneath five years of court records, police reports, and official medical files. She was David’s first wife, a woman of terrifying intelligence and wildly unpredictable psychological darkness whose volatile mind had systematically torn their marriage apart until her violent, fiery car crash on the coastal highway half a decade ago. David had personally identified the scorched metal of her car; he had stood beside a closed casket; he had attended the funeral and spent three long years in intensive trauma therapy just to learn how to speak in full sentences again. Rebecca was dead. She was supposed to be ashes locked away in a marble mausoleum three states away. Yet here was his daughter—who had been a mere infant when Rebecca died, a child who had never been shown a picture of her mother and whose name was strictly forbidden from ever being uttered in David’s home—standing in the bright afternoon sunlight, explicitly stating that Rebecca had handed her a note. The rational, desperate part of David’s mind fought to construct a logical explanation: a sick prank by an bitter relative, a cruel stunt by a tabloid reporter, or a hallucination born of Lily’s childhood anxiety. But as he stared at the handwriting faintly visible through the folded paper, a colder, far more terrifying truth took root in his mind. The phantom was not in his head. The woman who had destroyed his youth was breathing the very same air, walking the grounds of his wedding, hiding just beyond the trees.
