I turned around and walked all the way to Pinecrest Cemetery.

Dad had always said he wanted to be buried beside my mother. I needed to see his name carved into the stone before I could accept that he was truly gone.

Near a cluster of large trees, an elderly gardener stopped me.

“Who are you looking for, young man?” he asked.

“Camden Dennis,” I replied. “His wife told me he’s buried here.”

The old man studied me with sadness in his eyes.

“You’re Finnley, aren’t you?”

Cold spread through my chest.

“How do you know my name?”

The gardener glanced toward the main gate before lowering his voice.

“Because your dad asked me to give you this if you ever came looking for him.”

He reached inside his jacket and removed a yellow envelope.

It contained a letter and a small key stamped with the words STORAGE UNIT 108.

“But where is my dad buried?” I asked.

The gardener swallowed.

“Not here, son. And if you want to know the real story, don’t go back to that woman yet.”

I opened the letter immediately.

The first sentence read: Son, if you are reading this, it means Reagan has already started lying to you.

That was when I understood that my father’s death was not the end of the nightmare.

It was the beginning of something far worse.

PART 2

My father’s letter was written in his familiar heavy block handwriting. Reading it felt as if he were speaking to me from somewhere beyond the grave.

Son, I am so sorry I never came to visit you, the letter said. It wasn’t because I thought you were guilty. It was because by the time I finally realized what they did to you, I was already very sick and they were watching my every move.

I paused.

The word “watching” tightened around my lungs.

Reagan didn’t want me talking to you, and Carter kept me isolated, the text continued. For months, they made me believe you stole money from our construction company. They showed me documents, but everything was fake.

A crushing mixture of anger and pain moved through me.

At first, my father really had believed their story.

I forced myself to continue.

I eventually found duplicate invoices, weird bank transfers, and papers signed on days when I was totally knocked out from chemotherapy. I found bank accounts in Carter’s name, and I found your work password written down in Reagan’s notebook.

The letter trembled in my hands.

I put all the evidence in storage unit 108 in Phoenix. Do not confront Reagan until you go see it first. Do not trust anyone in that house.

The final words read: They made you take the blame for something you didn’t do. I love you, son. Dad.

Thomas, the gardener, gave me enough money for a bus ticket to the industrial district.

“Your dad used to come to the cemetery when he was very sick,” Thomas told me quietly. “He said you needed to leave prison with the truth in your hands.”

The storage facility stood among warehouses, garages, and auto-repair shops in a rough part of town.