Why Would She Lie

Chapter 01 - You Asked Me to Come Alone

Chloe's bedroom held the same cream walls and pale afternoon light it always had, the same neatly made bed, the same wooden dresser with her ballet trophies lined up in careful rows.

She'd closed the door the second her father stepped through it, pressing her back against it like that alone might buy her a few more seconds of courage.

Harrison watched his daughter's hands tremble around the strap of her red recital bag, the same dress she'd worn for Sunday's performance still on from earlier that afternoon, and felt his stomach tighten with a specific, unfamiliar dread.

"You asked me to come alone," he said gently, keeping his voice soft, careful not to spook whatever this was.

Chloe glanced toward the hallway once, listening, before reaching into the recital bag and pulling out a small, old silver locket, tarnished at the edges, the kind of piece that had clearly been hidden away for a long time before today.

She placed it in his palm, her fingers lingering a moment longer than necessary, as though letting go of it meant letting go of something considerably larger.

"I found this hidden in Mom's room," she whispered.

Harrison's breath caught. Elise's room, the one they still hadn't fully cleared out two years after her accident, the one Chloe visited sometimes when she missed her mother too much to bear it alone.

He turned the locket over in his fingers, confused, and found the small clasp, opening it slowly.

Inside, a faded photograph. Two young women standing close together, laughing at something outside the frame, arms linked at the elbow the way only genuinely close friends stood for photographs.

One of them was unmistakably Elise, younger, her hair different, but her eyes exactly the same.

The other was Meredith.

Harrison's expression shifted from confusion to something considerably colder, a specific, sinking recognition that the woman he'd married last spring, the woman who had told him, more than once, that she'd never once met his late wife, had apparently known her well enough to stand arm in arm with her in an old photograph tucked inside a locket.

Chloe gripped his sleeve, voice barely audible. "She told me they'd never met."

Before Harrison could respond, Meredith's voice carried up from downstairs, calm, curious, entirely too composed for the specific silence that had settled over the house in the past three minutes.

"Chloe? Is your father with you?"

Chloe froze completely, eyes wide with fear.

Harrison closed the locket in one swift motion and stepped in front of his daughter, positioning his body between her and the closed door.

He stared at the door, voice low, almost to himself.

"Why would she lie about knowing your mother?"