Chapter 1 - THE SUITCASE IN THE LIVING ROOM
A terrified little girl pounds from inside a locked hard-shell suitcase in a Connecticut mansion.
“Daddy… please open it before she comes back.”
Ethan drops his briefcase when he realizes the luggage is moving.
“Sophie! Keep talking to me!”
He grabs a fireplace tool and uses it only to break open the external lock.
Inside, six-year-old Sophie is awake, breathing normally, and physically unharmed.
She tumbles safely into her father’s arms, clutching a photograph of her late mother.
“She said Mom’s room belongs to somebody else now.”
Ethan slowly looks toward the grand staircase.
Celeste is coming down with passports and airline tickets in her hands.
Behind her stands Richard, only partially dressed.
The moment Celeste sees the opened suitcase, everything slips from her hands.
Sophie tells her father that her stepmother was planning to take her away and let Richard move into her mother’s bedroom.
Ethan picks up one of the tickets.
It has Sophie’s name printed on it.
“Where exactly were you taking my daughter?”
Then Sophie reveals one final secret.
Before her mother died, she wrote something on the back of that photograph.
Ethan turns it over.
May you like
His face goes completely still.
But the message is not shown.
