Chapter 2 - The House of Ghosts
The silence that followed Annie’s words stretched so long I could hear the faint hum of the Sub-Zero refrigerator in the corner. The kitchen seemed to contract around us, the stainless steel and white marble suddenly feeling less like a luxury showpiece and more like a refrigerated vault.
"What did you say?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave, danger humming in the cadence.
"You heard me, sir," Annie said, holding her ground. She didn't flinch, despite the fact that I was a man who routinely made Fortune 500 executives sweat with a single arched eyebrow. "You think you've built a fortress here. You've got state-of-the-art security, biometric locks, cameras on every perimeter, and a rotating door of professionals who treat your home like a clinical laboratory. But a house isn't a home when the walls are full of ghosts you refuse to name."
"My wife died in that car, Annie," I said, rising from the stool, my height giving me an automatic physical dominance I didn't consciously intend to use. "Her clothes are still in that closet. Her books are on the nightstand. If I want to preserve the memory of the woman who built this family, that is my prerogative."
"It's not preservation, Mr. Morrison. It's a shrine to your own guilt," she shot back, her voice flashing with sudden, sharp heat. "You weren't in the car, were you?"
The question hit me right in the solar plexus. The breath rushed out of my lungs.
"I was at an acquisition meeting in Manhattan," I whispered, the old, familiar shame washing over me—the guilt of being safe in a glass tower while my family was being torn apart on the highway.
"Exactly," Annie said, her tone softening, though the sting remained. "And ever since that day, you've tried to buy absolution. You pay nannies top dollar to fix your children, but you hand them schedules and reward charts instead of holding them when they cry. You escape into Morrison Dynamics because numbers don't look at you with disappointment. But your sons aren't spreadsheets, sir. And they’ve been trying to tell you something about the people you've been letting into this house."
I stared at her, my mind racing back through the parade of caregivers who had passed through our lives over the past year. "The nannies? Are you accusing one of them of something?"
"I'm not accusing anyone of anything yet," Annie said, turning off the whistling kettle and pouring hot water into a chipped ceramic mug. "I'm just telling you what happened this morning before you came home early. When I went upstairs to change the linens in the master bedroom, the door to the adjoining nursery was open. Jordan and Justin were standing at the foot of your late wife's bed. They weren't crying. They were pointing at something."
"Pointing at what?"
"At the portrait of Lauren hanging above the vanity," Annie said, her eyes dark. "And then Justin looked at me, grabbed the hem of my apron, and said, 'The bad lady is coming back.'"
My blood ran cold. "Which bad lady? The fifth nanny? Miss Higgins?"
"Miss Higgins left three weeks ago," Annie said slowly. "And according to the employment agency logs, she's working for another family in Greenwich. But yesterday afternoon, when you were at the office, I found something tucked behind the baseboards in the boys' playroom. Something someone went to great lengths to hide."
She walked over to the kitchen island, reached into the deep pocket of her gray dress, and pulled out a small, rectangular object.
It was a digital voice recorder—sleek, black, and identical to the ones we used for executive dictations at Morrison Dynamics.
May you like
"What is that?" I breathed.
"Press play," Annie said, sliding it across the marble toward me. "And listen to what your sons hear every single night after you turn off their lights and go down to your home office to work."
