Chapter 14 - The Hidden Safe
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Twenty minutes later, a young, nervous woman named Clara was ushered into the conference room. She was clutching a small, rusted iron key wrapped in a velvet cloth.
“Mrs. Vance,” Clara said, her voice shaking as she sat down across from me. “I worked for Mrs. Montgomery for four years. I saw how she treated you. I saw how she treated everyone.”
She set the iron key on the glass table.
“When the federal agents were breaking down the front doors this morning, Mrs. Montgomery screamed at me to go to her private dressing room and burn the contents of the floor safe hidden behind her wardrobe.”
“Why didn't you burn them?” Ethan asked sharply.
“Because I read the label on the ledger inside,” Clara whispered, her eyes wide with fear. “It wasn't about money or stocks.”
She looked directly at me.
“It was about your family, Sarah. Your late mother’s death twenty years ago.”
My heart stopped beating.
My mother had passed away when I was five years old in a sudden, tragic car accident involving a commercial delivery truck—an accident that had left my father broken and financially crippled for a decade.
“What does my mother have to do with Cordelia Montgomery?” I demanded, my hands trembling as I reached for the key.
“The truck that struck your mother’s car twenty years ago,” Clara said softly, “belonged to a logistics firm owned by Julian Montgomery. Cordelia paid off the investigators to cover up the mechanical defect that caused the crash so her husband wouldn't face corporate liability.”
The room went deathly still. The air felt completely sucked out of my lungs.
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My marriage to Lachlan hadn't just been an accidental target for financial exploitation.
Cordelia had targeted me specifically to keep my father close, ensuring we would never re-examine the old insurance settlements or uncover the corporate negligence that had killed my mother.
