Chapter 49: Secrets Unveiled Part 2

Aishleen stood in the hallway of the entrance, still in a daze and unable to control the speed of her heartbeat. A deafening silence had surrounded her since Keenan had left, until a loud thud sounded from the man's study, as if he was pounding on the door.

Forcing herself to calm down, Aishleen quickly straightened up against the wall and began walking toward Keenan's study. Suddenly, Aishleen was overcome with regret that Keenan had chosen to leave without giving her a chance to speak or explain. *But will he trust me?*

Doubts began to take over as Aishleen walked down the hallway, knowing that the things she had kept secret wouldn't be easy to explain. Not when Aishleen was still having trouble revealing them herself.

As Aishleen approached Keenan's study, she tried again and again to convince herself that he would understand. Keenan had experience with people trying to bring him down before, she told herself, so he would understand.

As soon as Aishleen reached the study, the door slammed shut and everything went quiet again. She reached for the doorknob, but stopped herself as she touched the cold steel, as Aishleen couldn't find the strength to open it and face him again.

*What am I going to say? Where do I start?*

Aishleen slowly backed away from the door, knowing it was impossible to talk to Keenan now when she was not ready. It was impossible to explain everything to him when Aishleen was clearly not ready. So Aishleen turned and walked into the master bedroom with her head down. She knew that her only option now was to retreat in defeat.

The bedroom had always felt so spacious since the first day Aishleen moved in. But after days of sharing the room and bed with her husband, she felt so empty and alone when she entered without him. Feeling broken and lost, Aishleen sat down at the end of the bed. Her purse fell carelessly to the woman's side just before Aishleen let her body fall backwards and propped herself up on the made-up bed.

Aishleen enjoyed the silence, with Aishleen's distracting thoughts as her only company, until she heard the phone ringing from her forgotten bag. Aishleen made no move to answer it at first, letting it ring a few times until it stopped, only to hear a few notification tones from her phone, indicating an incoming email. Frowning, but still lying in bed, Aishleen looked down at her purse, trying to figure out who was contacting her in the middle of the night.

*"I'm going to let you know as soon as I can."*

Herman's words echoed in Aishleen's head, causing her to quickly reach for her phone. She quickly took the phone out of her pocket and opened the notifications that appeared on the screen, confirming that they were all sent by the hacker. Aishleen read through the emails and text messages carefully before rushing to her desk, turning on her laptop, and opening the files she had just received.

After a few minutes, the images attached to the email finally appeared on the screen, and Aishleen looked at them with concern. She was confused as to why these pictures had been sent to her. They were candid moments of her with her late ex-fiancé, taken when they were still dating, a few weeks after he had proposed to her. Aishleen was wearing a white blouse and a soft cream-colored skirt, while Darrel was wearing an ivory-colored shirt that she had given him as a birthday present.

Aishleen continued scrolling down to find more photos, this time of Keenan taken a few years ago when he was still in a relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Rachella Romanov.

Aishleen tried to piece together the puzzle as she continued to examine each picture, but suddenly her phone rang again, breaking the silence in the room and distracting her.

"I know you're reading my email," Herman said on the other end after Aishleen answered the call.

"Yes, I'm reading it," Aishleen replied, still focused on her laptop screen. "But I don't understand. These old photos are mine, and I already know about Keenan and Rachella's relationship."

Herman just chuckled with an amused tone in his voice. "Relax, open the next email," Herman said just as a notification about a new email appeared on the screen. Aishleen opened the email and found more old photos attached.

The first photo showed Darrel, still wearing the same ivory shirt as before, sitting by a window in a luxurious waiting room that Aishleen didn't recognize. He is talking to a man Aishleen recognizes as Jonah Romanov. The photo seems to have been taken from a distance, and neither of them seemed to realize that there were eyes watching and recording their every move from the other side.

Aishleen continued to flip through each of the old photos Herman had sent, scrolling down with the cursor on her laptop. This time the photos showed Rachella Romanov wearing the same dress that Aishleen had seen in the photos of her with Keenan. Rachella was having lunch with the other cousin, Edgar Romanov.

Sometimes Aishleen frowned as she looked at each photo, trying to connect the important dots between the images. But the more she looked, the more she felt that something was wrong.

A sense of unease began to creep over Aishleen, making her even more curious to know what was really going on and what all this meant.

"Herman—what is the point of all this?" Aishleen asked, her voice trembling as she tried to make sense of the images that were appearing before her eyes.

Feeling extremely curious, Aishleen reopened the previous email, scrolled through its contents, and began to compare it to the one she had just received, paying close attention to the date the pictures were taken. And just as she suspected, they were all taken on the same day, with Rachella Romanov's photos taken almost three years before Aishleen's own.

"A connection," Herman said with a flash of satisfaction in his voice, while Aishleen was still busy comparing each picture. "They were both connected by cousins at one time, and I'm still figuring out why or how it happened. They were all taken on the same day."

"Yes, I... I can see that," Aishleen mused in a low voice, letting her words sink in slowly as she sat back down, completely confused.

With everything that had happened throughout the day, followed by what had just happened between her and her husband, it was too much to take in all of this new information in an instant. Just before Aishleen tried to speak, the sound of another message caught her attention.

"A familiar face to you," it said, its voice sounding much more careful as it spoke. Almost reluctantly, which made Aishleen open the next email even more carefully.

This email also consisted of pictures. And they were all of Aishleen. She felt a cold shiver run down her spine again when she realized that most of the pictures were from security cameras and had been taken recently.

The first group of photos showed Aishleen with Detective John, taken on the rainy day of their first meeting. The photos were sent in chronological order, from the moment Aishleen left her father's office building to the moment she parted ways with him at the entrance to the bus stop.

However, as Aishleen recalled the events of that day, her eyes fell on a man who repeatedly appeared in the photos, following them from a safe distance as Aishleen walked with John under a black umbrella. The man was also seen standing not too far away, watching as they stopped on a street corner just a block from the bus stop to listen to the recording on John's cell phone.

He continued to appear in subsequent photos that Aishleen saw. She studied each photo carefully, noting that he followed her as she shopped with Erick for her wedding preparations, sat across the dining room as she ate lunch with her mother, and was even seen sitting in the car late at night, following her as she ran out of the apartment after her dinner date with Keenan and his parents, and as she walked to meet John that night.

Aishleen studied his face and features as she looked at each photo until she was sure she recognized who he was. His appearance was easy to distinguish among the other people in the photos; his body was tall and slender, always wearing the dark clothes Aishleen was familiar with - the long black coat that covered his body on rainy days and the black coat on other days - and his wavy black hair that fell over his face, covering his eyes that were always watching Aishleen's every move. She knew who he was and recognized him easily since Aishleen had seen him almost every day since their wedding day.

"But he..." she said to Herman, her voice trembling with frightening revelation before the conviction became real when Aishleen finally said his name. "Adrian?"

The man who kept appearing as her shadow was her own driver - Kenan's driver, actually - the man her husband had hired to drive Aishleen around and be her bodyguard.

"He's been following me all this time," she said again, not to anyone, but to herself. When everything finally became clear.

"Yes," Herman answered the woman, firmly, almost grimly to Aishleen's ears. "And he's been following you since before the wedding. Or rather, since Darrel's funeral."

And then everything fell into place.