Trust does not always break with a stranger at the door.
Sometimes it uses the key you handed it.
Detective Miller waited near Victor with his notebook closed.
“We’re treating it as a robbery,” he said.
He glanced at Victor before the final word left his mouth.
That glance told me more than the report.
I went back into Tessa’s room and lifted her hand toward the overhead light.
Her fingernails were clean.
No broken edges.
No skin beneath them.
No sign she had clawed at anyone.
“My wife knows martial arts,” I said.
Miller did not answer.
“If a stranger attacked her, she would’ve fought until her last breath.”
I turned her hand over carefully.
“There would be something under her nails.”
The hallway became painfully quiet.
“That means she wasn’t fighting strangers,” I said. “She was restrained by people she trusted.”
Mason’s paper cup cracked beneath his grip.
