Chapter 4 - VICTORIA’S VERSIONVictoria requested to speak with Sarah without police listening.
Lena refused.
Victoria accepted the camera, the microphone, and the detective sitting between them.
She had changed out of her wet coat. Without it, she looked less like the untouchable woman from magazine photographs and more like someone who had not slept in days.
“Harrison told you my family keeps dead people alive,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That is true.”
Sarah had expected a denial.
Victoria continued.
“But he left out the part where he helped us.”
Harrison worked for Vale House under a confidential security contract before he ever met Victoria. He specialized in tracing hidden assets, forged records, and people living under false names.
“He met you during one of those assignments,” Victoria said.
Sarah’s expression hardened.
“What assignment?”
“Your father asked him to watch you.”
Sarah looked toward the observation glass.
Harrison had always claimed they met by chance when he helped her after a flat tire outside a grocery store.
Victoria slid a photograph across the table.
Harrison stood beside Thomas Miller in a parking structure. The timestamp came from three weeks before Sarah met him.
“He knew who you were.”
“Why?”
“Because Thomas believed your mother left evidence with you.”
“I was twenty-four. I had nothing.”
“You had a key sewn into a childhood doll.”
Sarah looked toward Chloe’s damaged rag doll in the other room.
“That doll was not mine.”
“No. It belonged to me.”
Victoria’s mother had given it to her when she was five. After the woman disappeared, Thomas removed the toy from Vale House storage.
Years later, Harrison stole it.
“He mailed my doll to your daughter,” Victoria said. “He knew I would follow it.”
“Why would he want you to find us?”
“Because he wants us in the same room.”
Victoria believed Harrison had created a war between the two women to force Vale House’s hidden leaders into the open.
She admitted helping confine him.
“When I discovered he copied the death ledger, I locked him inside Rose House.”
“You kidnapped him.”
“Yes.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“I questioned him.”
“That is not an answer.”
Victoria looked away.
“He was injured trying to escape.”
Sarah did not believe that explained everything visible in the video.
“What happened after he disappeared?”
“Someone moved him from my basement.”
“You lost your own prisoner?”
“Rose House belongs to my father’s trust. I do not control every entrance.”
Marcus Vale, Victoria’s father, remained chairman of Vale House despite publicly retiring. He had built the identity network with Thomas Miller and several private attorneys.
Victoria claimed she had spent years trying to remove him.
“Harrison promised to help me expose my father,” she said. “Then he stole eighteen million dollars from a medical fund and vanished.”
“What medical fund?”
“A program for children with catastrophic illnesses.”
Sarah thought of Chloe.
“Did the children exist?”
Victoria’s silence answered.
The fund was a shell account used to move settlement money between Vale properties. Harrison transferred the money into dozens of trusts registered to former Vale House patients.
Whether that made him a thief or a whistleblower depended on which records were genuine.
Sarah showed her the note.
“Who knows what happened at 6:14 on Chloe’s birthday?”
Victoria’s face changed.
“Your father.”
“Chloe mentioned another baby.”
Victoria looked toward the camera, then back at Sarah.
“My father has a file labeled Miller Infant B.”
Sarah’s pulse hammered.
“Is there another child?”
“I never opened it.”
“Why?”
“Because Harrison threatened to destroy the file if I touched it.”
Sarah stood.
“You came to my home demanding the doll while knowing there might be another child connected to me?”
“I came because the doll unlocks the file.”
Lena placed both palms on the table.
“Where is Rose House?”
Victoria looked at her.
“If I take you there, Marcus will know I’ve changed sides.”
“You attacked an apartment with fake officers.”
“I did not send them.”
“Then who did?”
Victoria’s eyes moved toward Sarah.
May you like
“Thomas Miller.”
👉 Victoria admitted imprisoning Harrison, yet claimed Sarah’s supposedly loving father had sent the men who burned his granddaughter’s home.
