The Secret Daniel Kept From Me
Chapter 04 - The Secret Daniel Kept From Me
I took off my wedding dress at two in the morning.
My mother helped me with the buttons.
Neither of us spoke.
When the dress finally slid from my shoulders, I stepped away from it like it belonged to someone else.
A woman who still believed love meant there were no secrets.
Daniel waited downstairs.
I found him in the living room with his tie loosened and his jacket folded across one knee. Duke slept beside his shoes.
The dog lifted his head when I entered.
Daniel did not.
“Eighty-five thousand dollars,” I said.
He looked up.
“I wasn’t certain it was theft.”
“So you said nothing.”
“I was trying to protect your wedding day.”
I almost smiled.
“Excellent work.”
He closed his eyes.
I hated that I still knew when he was hurt.
I hated more that I was hurt too.
Daniel was an accountant. He had offered to help Lauren and me prepare for a business loan because we wanted to renovate the bakery’s second floor into a small teaching kitchen. Two weeks earlier, I had given him limited access to review our books.
He found transfers to a company called North Pine Consulting.
I had never heard of it.
Lauren had approved all three.
“Why didn’t you ask her?” I said.
“I did.”
My stomach turned.
Daniel looked down at his hands.
“She said North Pine was a temporary vendor for equipment sourcing.”
“And?”
“The company was formed six months ago.”
He paused.
“It’s registered to Nathan Cole.”
Lauren’s husband.
The room seemed to tilt.
Nate had lost his restaurant the previous year. Lauren told me they were struggling, but she never said how badly.
I sat down across from Daniel.
“So my sister may have taken money from our business, and you knew.”
“I knew something was wrong. That’s different.”
“You still kept it from me.”
“I wanted facts before I accused your sister.”
“Or you thought I was too fragile to handle it before our wedding.”
His silence answered for him.
That was the moment I removed my ring.
Daniel stared at it in my palm.
“I’m not ending us,” I said.
He exhaled.
“But I can’t marry you while I’m learning what everyone decided I didn’t deserve to know.”
I placed the ring on the coffee table.
Duke rose and came to me.
I sank my fingers into the fur behind his ears.
The dog had done what none of us had managed.
He had brought the hidden thing into the light.
The next morning, the church called.
Their security cameras had been checked.
There was footage of the hallway outside the bridal suite.
At 3:25 p.m., the video went black.
At 3:39, it returned.
May you like
Exactly fourteen minutes later.
And the person who had installed that camera system two months earlier was my brother-in-law, Nate.
