The agent stood up slowly.
I felt a knot in my stomach.
On the screen, my father pointed directly at the camera.
“The threat is Agent Karen Holt.”
The woman next to me.
The FBI agent.
His face paled.
My father continued.
“If it’s standing by your side right now, run.”
It all happened at the same time.
The agent pounced on the laptop.
I grabbed it first.
The screen trembled violently.
My father's voice filled the storage room.
“Karen Holt has been stealing evidence for six years and eliminating witnesses. It works for the people he says he investigates.”
The officer pulled a gun from under her coat.
“Turn it off.”
I stared at her.
The gun pointed straight at my chest.
Suddenly, all the strange things made sense.
The empty coffin.
The warning.
The text.
The urgency.
My father hadn't hidden from my mother.
He had hidden from her.
The officer's voice turned icy.
“Give me the laptop.”
Then a second voice resounded from the outside.
“Federal agents! Drop the gun!”
The warehouse turned into total chaos.
Men with tactical gear broke through the entrance.
The officer turned.
Someone knocked her down.
The gun fired once at the roof.
Concrete dust fell like rain.
He then disappeared among three armed officers.
I stumbled backwards against the wall.
The laptop remained open.
My father’s expressionless face was staring at me from the screen.
A high-ranking agent approached me.
“Are you okay?”
I couldn't answer.
My father was alive.
My mother was innocent.
And nothing I had believed in the last week was true.
The main agent took the laptop and resumed recording the video.
My father's image appeared again.
“Julian, if you’ve come this far, then they caught her.”
He smiled sadly.
It was the first sincere smile I saw in years.
“I regret the lie.”
My eyes were burning.
“But if you’re seeing this, it means we’re both still alive.”
The screen showed a set of coordinates.
A cabin in northern Maine.
“Come and find me, son.”
The video is over.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Then my phone vibrated for the last time.
A text message from my mother.
Three words.
I found it.
I looked at the message.
The main agent looked over my shoulder.
“It seems your father is not the only one who survived.”
Outside, it began snowing in the storage yard.
And somewhere hundreds of miles away, a man the world had buried that morning waited for his family to come home.
