Chapter 13 - The Mysterious Combination
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We drove home from the country club in absolute, suffocating silence.
Graham drove like a man possessed, his knuckles white against the leather steering wheel, his eyes darting to me every thirty seconds as if he expected me to evaporate from the passenger seat.
The moment we entered the house, I walked straight upstairs to my bedroom, locked the connecting door between our suites, and went to bed.
Downstairs, Graham did not go to sleep.
From 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM, I heard his heavy, frantic footsteps pacing the second-floor hallway outside my room, moving back and forth between his private study and the hallway.
Driven by a desperate, obsessive instinct, Graham had finally realized that something physical had changed on the night of our anniversary.
Standing in his dark study, holding a glass of neat bourbon, his eyes had landed on the wall panel behind his bookshelf.
He pulled the panel open, revealing the heavy antique steel safe.
Graham remembered seeing me walk up the rear stairs that night carrying a navy velvet box. He remembered that I had returned downstairs twenty minutes later without it.
He set his whiskey glass down on the desk, his hands shaking as he reached for the steel dial.
He turned the combination: 0-6-1-5-1-4—June 15, 2014. Our wedding day.
The lock mechanism buzzed red. Error.
Graham froze. He wiped his sweaty palms against his trousers and tried again, slowly dialing the six digits of our wedding anniversary.
Error.
I had changed the combination the night after the party.
May you like
Graham let out a low, ragged groan of frustration and slammed his palm against the heavy steel door.
He didn't know what was inside the box, but he knew with absolute certainty that whatever lay locked behind those two inches of hardened steel was the funeral monument of his marriage.
