CHAPTER ONE

C HAPTER O NE

Four Years Later

Sixty-five-year-old Rosella Marlow made her way up the long, curved staircase that began in the center of the foyer and ended on the second floor of her stately Victorian home, the most coveted house in the area, winner of the Best House on the Block award in 2018 and again in 2022. Last year, though, the award had gone to Chloe and Wesley Leavitt, whose house was across the street, sending shock waves through the neighborhood. At least, that’s how Rosella saw it. The Fabulous Forties district in Sacramento, California, an area so named because of the numbered avenues it occupied—Fortieth through Forty-Ninth, between J Street and Folsom Boulevard—was known for its architecture, an ensemble of Tudor homes with ivy-covered walls, Colonial Revivals, countless Victorians marked by gables and steeply pitched roofs, and charming bungalows.

The Leavitt home was none of those things. It was all stucco and earth tones. No charm or character. Chloe Leavitt defined her residence as having the characteristics of an Arts and Crafts home. But where were the artistic details influenced by nature? There were no stained-glass windows or tile work with fauna motifs. The decorative wood carvings were minimal. Chloe Leavitt and her home were not worthy of such a distinctive award. To make matters worse, Chloe was in charge of judge selection this year. The whole thing was a travesty.

Rosella stopped midway up the stairs to let out a huff at the thought, but also to catch her breath. Although she did her best to eat well and exercise a few times a week, she had recently been diagnosed with osteoporosis. Her daily routine could no longer be executed with the same ease. Aching joints and sore muscles were quickly becoming the norm.

At the landing, she straightened her sore back and took some time collecting herself. A moment later, she was back in motion. The sound of her footfalls bounced off the wood floors and echoed around her as she headed for her office—what used to be her late husband Lance’s favorite room, the place he went for privacy and peace of mind. As she stepped through the wide-open double doors, her heels sank into plush carpet. Walking past a long stretch of gleaming dark wood built-in bookshelves, she made her way to the massive antique desk near the fireplace carved out of marble. When Lance was alive, the desk had faced the double doors since he’d preferred to see who came and went, despite few, if any, visitors. After he passed away, Rosella had the furniture rearranged. Now the desk faced the three enormous picture windows looking out over the neighborhood.

Rosella went to the fireplace, opened the gas valve, and lit the bar. Even in the summer months, her bones felt brittle and cold. Once the wood stacked on the grate caught fire, she shut off the starter and took a seat behind the ornate desk her husband had claimed was built sometime in the Napoleonic era and once owned by royalty. Inside the top drawer, she found the mystery letter someone had placed in her mailbox three weeks ago. She unfolded it. No name. No return address. She had received it around the same time she’d first noticed someone was watching her.

On that particular day, she’d been sitting at her desk, distracted by all the commotion going on outside with the annual Fab 40s 5k Run/Walk, which had people passing her house in droves. As she often did when her stack of mail grew too tall, she’d lit the fireplace before sifting through the mail—bills, advertisements, a postcard addressed to someone she’d never heard of—using Lance’s sterling silver letter opener, the one with the snake coiled at one end, to unseal the envelopes. In quick, robotic movements, she’d touched each piece, then rolled her chair closer to the fireplace and tossed the advertisements and envelopes into the blazing fire. She’d then sorted the opened mail, unfolded a piece of paper, and read five words handwritten in big red block letters:

I Know What You Did

Perplexed, she’d scanned both sides of the paper for any hint of who the author might be. Realizing she might have tossed a possible clue into the fire, she jumped to her feet, grabbed the iron poker, and scrambled to retrieve the envelope before it went up in flames. Using the tip of the iron to poke and prod, she spotted the envelope right as the heat caused the edges to twist and curl. She reached toward the envelope, but the flames licked her palm, forcing her to draw back and watch it quickly turn to ash.

Every day since, she’d wondered who might have written the note. Was it the same person she had seen watching her from a distance? If they’d set up security cameras outside as Lance had talked about doing when he was alive, she might have caught the person already. She inhaled. She felt threatened and she didn’t like it. Who was watching her, and why? Nobody could possibly know what she had done. She was sure of it.

Drawn to the window, she pushed herself from her seat, grabbed her binoculars from the corner of the desk, and went to gaze out at her neighbors’ homes, thinking about life and how things tended to change in the blink of an eye.

She had started life off in what she considered to be a house of horrors, running away at sixteen, then lucking out six months later, when she walked into a bank to apply for a job and met the bank’s chief financial officer, Lance Marlow. He was ten years older, kindhearted, and smart as a whip with a good business sense. It didn’t matter to him that she was inwardly scarred and homeless. He found her a place to stay, became her friend, supporter, and protector. Somewhere between the ages of nineteen and twenty, their friendship became something more, and he proposed on her twenty-first birthday. They married and made their home in this very house.

She and Lance decided not to have children, but a surprise pregnancy when she was forty-five ended up being a godsend. Her son, Daniel, was born happy and healthy. A pudgy little ball of joy. More surprising than the pregnancy was the fact she enjoyed being a mother. She did her best to set a good example for Daniel. Even while working long hours as a journalist, she found time to have fun with her boy.

Fifteen months ago, when she thought life couldn’t get any better, Lance and Daniel, nineteen years old at the time, were headed for the mountains when their vehicle hit an icy patch and plummeted down a steep slope, abruptly stopped by a tree. Daniel died instantly. Lance wasn’t so lucky. He suffered, lingering in the hospital for days, tortured with pain, until finally he passed, too.

Alone with her dismal thoughts and excruciating grief, Rosella sought help, but therapy felt meaningless. Her beautiful baby boy was dead. She became as hollow as a long-dead tree, the result of physiological stress causing her “heartwood” to be exposed, allowing outside forces to invade like an infection impervious to antibiotics. Bitter and resentful, she turned on coworkers and began to envy people with full, happy lives. Unable to lift herself from despair, she retired earlier than planned and sat alone in her misery until darkness settled comfortably inside her once again.

Fifteen months had passed. And yet her anger and resentment had not. Every morning, she stood by the window and watched the comings and goings of her neighbors, busy people mindlessly going through the motions and getting nowhere. At least, that’s how it looked from where she stood.

The occupants of the house to her right were Jason and Dianne Abbott. As if on cue, the garage door rolled upward and a black F-150 pulled out. Rosella took a step back to the right as Jason glanced toward her window. He must have sensed her presence, because his gaze remained, unwavering, for a full fifteen seconds. He was a general contractor. His wife, Dianne, was a part-time intensive care unit nurse at Sutter Hospital. Every so often Rosella heard Dianne and Jason arguing, usually in the backyard, and sometimes right through the walls of their home.

No surprise there.

Jason Abbott was impetuous. Rosella didn’t care for him. When Bella, Rosella’s Chihuahua, was alive, Jason had complained every time she barked at a squirrel in her own backyard. If Jason wasn’t complaining about Bella, he was grumbling incessantly about her hedges, insisting their height prevented sun from reaching the roses in his yard. His latest gripe was over the property line, even though Rosella hired a surveyor and had documented proof of where the property line was located. Jason hired his own surveyor, claimed the property line was at least two inches off, and demanded she relocate her fence. When they convened at the courthouse to meet with a mediator, Jason had been unwilling to reach an amicable agreement.

Jason Abbott had pushed her to her limit.

Bella had passed on, hedges had been trimmed, and now, property line be damned, she would not relocate the fence between their properties. Enough was enough. Jason truly didn’t grasp who he was dealing with. Sure, he might know she had been a notable journalist until her sudden retirement after the death of her son. But he couldn’t possibly know she was writing a story about secrets—her neighbors’ secrets.

With sixty-five years under her belt, she knew a lot about secrets. Common skeletons in the closet included infidelity, abortion, and financial problems. But then there were the deep, dark secrets—knowingly harming another human being, stealing, stalking, and worse. Much worse. Those kinds of hidden truths were often suppressed, corroding the mind, body, and soul of those who held tight to them. They had the potential to ruin lives; the truth didn’t always set a person free.

Instead of a famous, award-winning journalist, Rosella now preferred to think of herself as a researcher. She had not only all the important contacts, which were invaluable when it came to making requests, but also the time and resources to dig deep. Once she’d put her sights on Jason Abbott, it hadn’t taken long before she struck gold. She was certain the man was embezzling from his company. There were so many warning signs it was hard to believe he had yet to be implicated in any wrongdoing: Vendors she talked to complained they hadn’t been paid in full, or even at all. Customers claimed they were repeatedly asked to make payments that had already been paid. And according to an accountant who no longer worked for the company, Jason’s project records were filled with odd transactions and duplicate payments.

Rosella had swiftly sent a letter—signed anonymously, of course—to Jason Abbott’s company. No need to hire anyone to reposition the fence, as she hadn’t heard a peep from Jason since. Which was nice because he wasn’t her only subject; she had work to do. Everyone living on her quiet, picturesque block was hiding something. Little secret or big? It didn’t matter. She would expose them and make these people suffer, just as she was.

And she would do it with the help of unsuspecting Shannon Gibbons.

Rosella had gone out of her way to find the woman. Convincing Shannon Gibbons to come work with her had been easy: “I’ll be your mentor. I’ll do whatever I can to help you achieve your dreams of becoming a journalist.”

Shannon had never done anything with her life. She was a wife and a mom, nothing more. An unfair assessment? Possibly. No matter. She was helping Shannon find a new identity outside of family, guiding her toward ambitions that extended beyond the roles of wife and mother, empowering her to embrace her individuality. She was doing Shannon a favor. Rosella planned to use empathy and compassion to pull her in and gain her trust. After that, everything else would fall into place.

Rosella would feel no guilt for uncovering the truth; her neighbors had it coming. Not one person on her block had been there for her when she’d lost her husband and son. Her world had collapsed after Daniel died, but not theirs. Her neighbors had simply moved on, fueling a fire within, a fire that had lain dormant for too long. She could almost taste the bitterness surrounding her.

Was she focused on her neighbors because she no longer had a family of her own? Was she angry with all people, or only the happy ones? Did she want to expose their secrets because her own pain and loss had been laid bare for all to see? Yes, yes, and yes were her answers. She knew better than Dr. Everett Finnigan, the therapist she’d opened up to after losing Daniel, that her obsession with these people was helping her cope. Misery, she realized, truly did love company.

As she stood before the window looking out, she saw Chloe Leavitt head for Kaylynn Alcozar’s house. From there, Chloe and Kaylynn met up with Becky Bateman across the street. Their smiles were a cruel reminder of the happiness Rosella had lost. Watching them through narrowed eyes, she clenched her fists tightly at her sides. How dare they be so joyful when her world lay shattered at her feet?

After the women disappeared from sight, Rosella lowered the binoculars. With a heavy sigh, she turned away from the window, retreating deeper into the darkness of her solitude. Most outsiders who strolled down her tree-lined street would believe the inhabitants were living the American dream.

But they would be wrong.