A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Connections, baby.”
“SSA Chen gave you this?”
“Not exactly.”
That was absolutely not reassuring. “Henry.”
He stayed maddeningly tight-lipped, eyes scanning lines of information as they loaded onto the screen.
Then he went still.
“What?” I blurted. “What is it?”
Henry clicked into another file.
“William Kellerman’s records stop cold ninety days after the fire. Banking activity. Employment. Tax history. Everything disappears.”
Another screen opened beside it.
“And Otto Keller appears six weeks later.”
“No fucking way.”
“No prior history before that point. No childhood records that survive digitization. No long-term financial trail. It’s manufactured.”
I stared at the screen, then at the yearbook photo still sitting open beside the keyboard.
William Kellerman.
Otto Keller.
Same eyes. Same posture.
Same. Fucking. Man.
“How do you even do that?” I shuddered. “Just… become someone else?”
The arm around my waist tightened. “Ashford had powerful people attached to it. Judges. Politicians. Law enforcement. Men with enough money to make paperwork disappear and new identities appear in its place.”
The idea of it felt rotten in a way my brain almost couldn’t hold onto for too long at once.
Otto—William—whatever the fuck his name really was—had stood in our kitchen. He’d carried groceries up our porch steps and waved at me through the window like he was just some lonely middle-aged man trying to be kind.
And the entire time, he’d been wearing someone else’s face.
Someone else’slife.
If Henry hadn’t been holding me together right now, I wasn’t entirely convinced I wouldn’t be on the floor dry heaving into one of his expensive rugs.
“How do people even live like that?” I asked quietly, staring at the screen hard enough that the words blurred for a second. “Just wake up every day pretend to be someone else?”
Henry’s thumb brushed slowly against my waist.
“They stop pretending after a while,” he said. “Eventually, it just becomes who they are.”
Fuck.
That made it worse.
