Chapter 15 - THE OTHER MAN
The storage unit should have been the worst thing we found.
It wasn’t.
At the bottom of a plastic bin, police discovered old photographs of Bianca with a man I had never seen.
They looked happy.
Engagement happy.
On the back of one photo was a name.
Owen Price.
Ortiz searched public records.
Bianca had lived with Owen six years before she met me.
They had been engaged.
They had never married.
“What happened?” I asked.
“According to a police report, Owen crashed his car after leaving home late one night. He told officers he felt dizzy and disoriented. No alcohol. No drugs found.”
My mouth went dry.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
Owen called me himself the next afternoon.
His voice was careful.
“I heard your name on the news,” he said. “Then I saw Bianca’s picture.”
I didn’t know what to say.
He did.
“Believe your mother.”
Those three words landed harder than anything else.
Owen told me Bianca had done something similar to his father. Misplaced documents. Missed appointments. Medication confusion. Small things that made an independent man look unreliable.
“I thought Dad was declining,” Owen said. “Bianca kept telling me to be patient with him.”
“What stopped the wedding?”
“My father found a recorder in his study.”
I sat forward.
“Did you go to police?”
“I tried. There wasn’t enough. Bianca said my father planted it because he hated her. Then I got sick one night. Dizzy. Nearly passed out on the stairs.”
The next week, Owen ended the engagement.
Two days later, his car’s brake line failed.
Investigators could not prove sabotage.
Bianca disappeared from his life.
Owen had spent years convincing himself it had been coincidence.
“Until now,” he said.
Before we hung up, he mentioned one detail that made my chest tighten.
“She keeps trophies.”
“What kind?”
“Something from every family she leaves.”
I looked toward the storage-unit inventory spread across my desk.
No jewelry from my mother.
No family heirloom.
Then I remembered the pool.
May you like
Mom had gone into the water wearing two shoes.
Only one had ever been found.
