They Turned My Vacation Into A Chore List Without Knowing What My Phone Was Hiding

I opened my banking app for the first time since the taxi ride, because a notification had been sitting on my screen the whole time. It read, “Transfer complete: $3,150 sent to Curtis Whitlock.” My stomach dropped. Six months of overtime had left my account that morning, and the login used was mine. Daniel had known my password for two years.

Then the front door banged open. Brooke walked back in alone, locked the deadbolt behind her, and smiled. “Before you get any ideas,” she said, “your flight home is booked under Daniel’s name, your savings are already in Curtis’s account, and you are forty minutes from the nearest town. So stop staring at that phone and start scrubbing.” She tilted her head. “Daniel told us everything, including that you would try to leave.”

Adrian Vale
Adrian Vale studied English literature. He is a novelist. He writes atmospheric literary fiction, quiet, character-driven stories about people who drift out of their own lives and the strange, lingering things that find them afterward.

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