“Why do you have photos of me on your desk?”

He stopped typing and turned his eyes to meet mine. “Because you’re my daughter.”

“We don’t have a relationship.”

He turned back to the computer. “That’s your choice. I respect it. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re speaking to me or not. You’re still my child.”

“Don’t try to use the psychobabble you used on Caro with me,” I warned. “She was the forgiving type. I’m not.”

“You’re not going to like this, but you’re more like me than Caro ever was.”

“Just find the message,” I snapped.

“I’m not saying that to hurt your feelings,” he added. “I know what it’s like to be angry. To not know how to deal with that rage.”

“Shut up. You don’t know anything about me. We’re biologically related, but I don’t think of you as my father. To me, you’re just the man who used to beat up my mother.”

There was a stone-cold silence in the room.

“I was a different man when I was drinking,” he whispered. “I can’t tell you how much I regret it.”

This wasn’t a new argument. He’d always blamed alcohol for his rages, even back when he was still drinking. He liked to pretend it covered up his true nature, as if it were a disguise controlling the man who wore it. But the opposite was true: Alcohol unmasked the real man and his black heart. It revealed his true identity, like a horror-movie monster pulling off its human mask to reveal slime and tentacles. The darkness underneath was always there.

“Just find the message,” I repeated.

I watched him go through company emails. Nothing from Osiris’s Vault.

“Maybe it’s in the mail at home?” he suggested.

“It’s an email! Not regular mail!” I shouted in frustration. “Look, you must have another email address. People sign up for them all the time and forget about them.”

“I’ve used this one for twenty years,” he said. “The company one is newer, because I resisted having a website for so long. But these are the only two I use.”

Exasperated, I pulled out my phone. “It would look like this. See?”

There it was: Osiris’s Vault keeps all your data safe and secure, said the text at the top of the screen. Caroline Crawley wants you to read this letter.

“That thing?” He looked astonished. “I deleted it immediately.”

“What? Why? What did it say?”

“I don’t know. I never opened it. But these vultures were calling me and showing up here asking if Caro was on drugs. I thought it was part of that.”

“Open up your trash folder,” I ordered him.

He did. There it was: Caro’s message. I pushed his hand out of the way and clicked on it myself.

Dad,