Chapter 7 - Where Emma WentTorres issued an alert for Celeste and her car. Claire gave the police Emma’s photograph, the clothes she was wearing, and the name of the stuffed fox she had carried to school.
Then she sat at the table with her hands flat against it, waiting for a question she could answer.
I wanted to promise we would get Emma back. Torres had already said that. Claire needed information, so I called everyone I could think of who had worked with Celeste.
Most knew nothing.
Natalie Price, Celeste’s former assistant, answered on the fifth ring.
“Is Emma with her?” Natalie asked before I explained.
“Yes.”
Natalie swore softly. “Celeste has a property north of town. It belongs to one of the Harbor House vendors, but she uses it as a records store. She told me never to put the address in her calendar.”
She gave Torres the location and the gate code.
It was an old residential center, closed years earlier, with a service road behind it. Police arrived first. Claire and I followed Torres’s instructions and waited two streets away.
Through the windshield, I could see a line of bare trees and the roof of the building. I watched officers go through the gate.
Claire’s phone rang.
Celeste.
Claire put it on speaker for Torres.
“Emma’s fine,” Celeste said. “She’s drawing.”
“Let me speak to her,” Claire said.
“Bring Daniel’s files. The list Elliot gave Jonathan and anything from the storage unit.”
“The police have them.”
“You kept copies.”
“Let me hear my daughter.”
I heard movement, then Emma’s voice, faint but steady.
“Mommy?”
“I’m here, sweetheart. Are you hurt?”
“No. Celeste said we’re waiting.”
“I’m coming.”
Celeste took the phone. “No police, Claire.”
Claire looked directly at Torres. “Tell me where in the building you are.”
Celeste hung up.
Torres signaled her team. The call had given them confirmation Emma was there and time to narrow the phone’s location. They had already seen a vehicle parked behind the center.
Minutes passed. Then a door opened at the far end of the building. An officer came out carrying Emma.
Claire was out of the car before Torres finished telling us it was safe.
I stayed back and watched her run.
Emma wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck. Her stuffed fox hung from one hand. Claire held her so tightly that Emma’s shoe fell off, and neither of them noticed.
Gideon had been with her in a former classroom. He had tried to leave through a side entrance when he heard the officers arrive. They arrested him outside.
Celeste was gone.
Gideon told Torres she had left the building before Claire’s call. He claimed he believed she had permission to collect Emma, though he had heard Claire ask where her daughter was. Investigators would test that account against his messages.
At the station, a child specialist spoke with Emma while Claire sat beside her. Emma said Celeste had promised to take her to see a surprise. When they reached the empty building, she had asked to go home. Gideon had told her to wait.
“I kept my fox,” Emma said.
Claire kissed the top of her head. “You can keep him with you as long as you want.”
Leah brought us food, dry clothes, and news. Police had searched the building and found boxes of invoices from Harbor House. Some were shredded. Others still bore Celeste’s handwritten notes.
Natalie arrived that evening to give a statement.
She had worked for Celeste for five years, then resigned three months earlier. Her hands shook as she held a paper cup of water.
“I kept thinking I could resign and it would be over,” she said. “When I heard about Emma, I realized Celeste would keep doing whatever she thought she could get away with.”
Natalie confirmed that Celeste had instructed staff to deny Claire access to me after Daniel’s death. She had seen Claire’s messages forwarded to Celeste instead. She could also identify the person who drafted the false emails attributed to Claire: Natalie herself.
“I was told they were examples for the auditors,” she said. “Celeste asked me to format them like emails. Later I saw them in the report.”
Claire looked at her for a long moment. “You knew they were there?”
“I knew after the report came out. I should have told someone.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “You should have.”
Natalie accepted that without defending herself.
She had brought a copy of her old calendar and a recording from a meeting held four days before Daniel died. She said Celeste had sent it to her to prepare the minutes. Natalie had kept it because the written minutes changed afterward.
In the recording, I heard my own voice.
“Take care of Daniel before he takes those papers outside this room.”
Claire turned toward me. I knew the words. I knew what had been discussed. Yet stripped of the rest of the meeting, they sounded terrible.
Natalie stopped the recording. “Celeste has a shorter clip. She threatened to release it if Jonathan challenged her.”
Leah asked for the complete file. Natalie handed it over.
“She may already have sent the short one,” she said.
May you like
By morning, she had.
The edited recording spread alongside the claim that I had ordered someone to silence my own son.
