He Blocked My Number the Night I Died Chapter 04

Someone tried to burn me alive.

And I already knew who had the code to my backyard gate.

My hands shook as I typed my old password into our home security cloud on Jude’s laptop. The cameras had melted. The footage hadn’t.

4:09 p.m. Two hours before the fire reached me.

A woman in a black hoodie slipped through the side gate. She didn’t hurry. She knew exactly where the cameras were-except one.

She set down a red gas can by the back fence.

Then she pushed back her hood and checked her reflection in my kitchen window.

Gray eyes. Trembling lip.

Sienna.

I watched it four times.

The fourth time, I made myself look at her face. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t trembling. She was smiling. A small, private smile, the kind you make when you finally get to open a present you’ve been staring at for

years.

At 4:31 p.m., she slipped back out the gate.

At 4:58 p.m., she posted her first “panic attack” story. Smoke is so bad today. Can’t breathe. Scared.

At 5:20 p.m., Caleb texted me: Heading to Sienna’s. She’s spiraling. Don’t wait up.

At 6:14 p.m., my backyard was on fire.

“She planned it,” Jude said quietly. He’d been standing behind me the whole time, arms crossed, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “She set it, then pulled your husband forty miles away so no one would come.”

“She didn’t need to pull hard,” I said. “He was always halfway out the door.”

I closed the laptop.

My first instinct was to call the police. To scream it from a rooftop. Look. Look what she did. Look what

you all let her do.

But I knew my family. If I handed them that video today, my mother would say it was doctored. My father would hire the best lawyer in California. Sienna would cry, and Caleb would hold her. And I would be the

jealous, unstable sister who faked her own death and framed a poor orphan.

I’d seen it happen a hundred times on a smaller scale.

When I was fourteen, Sienna cut up my prom dress. I found the scissors in her room. My mother grounded me for “snooping.”

When I was nineteen, my scholarship letter disappeared from the mailbox. Sienna ended up at the art school I’d applied to. “Pure coincidence,” my father said.

No. If I was coming back from the dead, I was coming back with a gun loaded with truth, and I wasn’t going to miss.

“I need a lawyer,” I said. “A shark.”

Jude pulled out his phone. “My ex-sister-in-law. Ingrid Shaw. She made a pharmaceutical CEO cry on the

witness stand. Twice.”

Ingrid arrived that afternoon in a charcoal suit and red lipstick. She watched the footage without blinking,

then turned to me.

“Mrs. Vance-”

“Nora. Please don’t call me that.”

“Nora.” Something like approval crossed her face. “Is there any reason your sister would benefit from your death besides your husband?”

I almost said no.

Then I remembered.

“My grandmother,” I said slowly. “June Ashford. When Caleb started his company, she funded it. In exchange, she took fifty-one percent of the voting shares and put them in a trust for me. They vest when i turn thirty.”

Ingrid’s pen stopped. “And when is your birthday?”

‘Saturday.”

“And if you die before Saturday?”

I felt sick. “The shares go to my estate. To my husband.”

Ingrid and Jude exchanged a look.

“So your sister,” Ingrid said carefully, “set the fire six days before you’d have legally controlled your husband’s billion-dollar company. With you dead, Caleb gets the shares. And Sienna gets Caleb.”

The room went silent.

“Did Caleb know?” Jude asked.

I thought about his voice on the phone. Is it terrible that part of me feels quiet?

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “That’s what scares me.”

Ingrid closed her notebook.

“Then here’s what we do. You stay dead until Saturday. On Saturday, you turn thirty. The shares vest. And then you walk into Vance Ridge’s board meeting and take your company back.”