The safe opened with a quiet metallic click.
For several seconds, I could not lift the lid.
My right hand shook from pain, and my left elbow had gone numb from dragging myself across the concrete.
Behind the steel door, someone touched the deadbolt and then stopped.
I froze with my fingers beneath the edge of the safe.
“Did you hear something?” Margaret asked from the hallway.
“No,” Harrison said too quickly.
His footsteps moved away.
I lifted the lid.
The black flash drive was exactly where I had left it, sealed inside a small plastic sleeve beneath copies of the bank statements Harrison’s client had brought to our house two years earlier.
I had not looked at the drive since the night Harrison begged me to destroy it.
I had not needed to.
I remembered every file.
Numbers stay with me when people do not.
I pulled out the drive and slid it beneath the padded lining of my leg brace.
Then I lowered the safe lid without letting it slam and dragged the rubber mat back into place.
Inside the house, drawers continued opening and closing.
Margaret was searching our bedroom.
“Check her desk again,” Harrison said.
“I already did.”
“Then check the closet.”
Their voices carried through the wall with the careless clarity of people who believed their victim had no way to move, listen, or fight back.
That was when I understood why Margaret had declared the master bedroom hers.
It was never about sleeping there.
They wanted me isolated while they searched every place I might have hidden the drive.
My surgery had given them the perfect opportunity.
I was injured, medicated, and expected to depend entirely on Harrison.
All he had to do was bring me home, take my phone, and make sure no one saw what happened after the front door closed.
They had almost succeeded.
But Harrison had built his life around appearances.
He remembered to smile at the neighbor.
He remembered to use a gentle voice at the hospital.
He remembered to carry my bag.
He forgot the safe.
The garage door control was mounted beside the interior door, nearly four feet above the floor.
Standing was impossible.
Crawling back across the concrete felt worse.
I did it anyway.
I moved slowly, pulling with my forearms and letting my uninjured leg push whenever it could.
Sweat ran into my eyes.
My brace scraped along the floor, and each vibration traveled through the fresh surgical site.
Halfway to the wall, I heard Margaret say, “Maybe she gave it to someone.”
“She wouldn’t,” Harrison replied.
“You said she destroyed it.”
“I said she told me she did.”
The silence that followed was different from the others.
Margaret’s voice dropped.
“Then why are we still looking?”
Harrison did not answer.
I reached the wall beneath the garage control.
A long-handled push broom rested nearby.
I hooked two fingers around the wooden handle and pulled it down.
The broom struck the floor with a crack that echoed through the garage.
Footsteps stopped inside the house.
I gripped the broom near its base, raised the handle, and pressed the garage-door button.
The motor groaned overhead.
