Chapter 4 - What the Fire Left Behind.
Skyley left her home at 8:41 a.m. under an order built from lies.
Ethan stood behind the glass doors with one hand in his pocket and victory in his eyes.
Vanessa remained in the kitchen, wrapped in Skyley's robe and looking like a prisoner who had only just noticed the bars.
Attorney Nora Reyes waited beside a black sedan at the curb.
She read the psychiatric affidavit before Skyley finished fastening her seat belt.
"Dr. Adrian Vale claims you described fantasies about setting Ethan on fire."
"I have never met Dr. Vale."
"He lists twelve private sessions."
"Then he treated a ghost."
Nora drove them to the small brick cottage Skyley had inherited with the main property.
The cottage stood beyond the old orchard and outside the temporary order's boundary.
Skyley had lived there as a child while her grandmother supervised construction of the white house.
The smell of cedar brought back memories she had kept buried beneath surgeries and board meetings.
She placed the gold ring on the kitchen table.
S.H. were her initials before marriage.
Four-seventeen was not a date she recognized.
Nora opened the fire investigation file.
"The official report blamed faulty wiring behind the stove."
Skyley touched the raised edge of her scar.
On the night of the fire, she had returned home early from a charity dinner.
The surgeons had later explained that another eight seconds inside the kitchen would have damaged her airway beyond repair.
Ethan repeated that detail whenever he wanted praise for staying beside her hospital bed.
Skyley now remembered that he had never asked how the patio doors locked by themselves.
He already knew.
The kitchen lights had failed as she stepped inside.
She had smelled gas, heard the patio lock engage, and seen a blue flame race beneath the cabinets.
Ethan had been outside when firefighters arrived.
He claimed he had gone running.
For months, Skyley believed his story because believing anything else hurt more than the grafts.
"Who called emergency services?" Nora asked.
"An unidentified woman."
"Not Ethan?"
"He said his phone was dead."
Nora laid the black card statement beside the report.
Phoenix Restoration had received its first payment the morning after the fire.
The invoice described emergency smoke removal in rooms the fire department reported as untouched.
Every listed technician had signed with the same handwriting.
Nora compared the signatures to Ethan's mortgage application and found the slant identical.
The same account had received another payment three nights ago, hours before the kerosene purchase.
Skyley studied the ring again.
Her mother had commissioned it shortly before dying in a car accident.
Grandmother Hale once told Skyley that her mother hid important truths inside ordinary things.
Skyley pressed the point of a sewing needle into the tiny mark after 4:17.
The inner band released with a faint click.
A strip of metal no larger than a fingernail slid out.
It was not jewelry.
It was an old security key stamped with the Hale Hearth company crest.
Nora searched the cottage and found a steel wall safe behind a framed photograph.
The key fit.
Inside lay a sealed envelope from Skyley's mother, dated twenty-seven years earlier.
Before Skyley could open it, the cottage window shattered behind them.
A gloved hand reached through the broken glass and snatched the fire investigation file from the table.
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ONE HOUR TO VACATE | DOMESTIC SUSPENSE
