She didn’t reply.
Another message arrived.
Now find the red folder.
Olivia stared at the screen.
“What red folder?”
A third message appeared.
Your father kept it where Marcus would never look.
Then the phone went silent.
Two hours later, Olivia was standing inside her childhood home.
Her father had died eight years earlier.
Since then, the house had remained mostly untouched.
She had visited occasionally, but she had never had the heart to completely empty it.
Her father had been a quiet man.
A disciplined accountant.
He had taught Olivia how to read financial statements when she was sixteen.
He had always told her:
“Numbers don’t lie. People do.”
At the time, she thought it was simply something accountants said.
Now those words felt like a warning from another life.
Olivia walked into his old study.
Dust covered the bookshelves.
The desk was still there.
His old calculator sat beside a stack of notebooks.
She searched the drawers.
Nothing.
She opened the filing cabinet.
Tax records.
Insurance documents.
Old receipts.
Nothing.
Then she remembered something.
Her father had always kept important documents inside books.
She scanned the shelves.
One book stood out.
An old accounting textbook.
She pulled it down.
Something slid from behind it.
A red folder.
Olivia’s heart began pounding.
She opened it.
