Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Rearview Mirror

Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Rearview Mirror

A week of suffocating quiet followed the first strike. The victory, confirmed by Betty’s curt text, felt clean, distant, almost sterile. Chris had vanished from our lives as completely as if he’d been erased. We changed the locks, and Mom, moving like a sleepwalker, began the slow, painful process of scrubbing his presence from the house. She packed his clothes into black trash bags and donated his collection of tacky beer steins to Goodwill. She never mentioned his name. She was a ghost in her own home, her resilience worn down to a fragile, translucent shell. Her only request was for peace, and for a short while, it seemed we had given it to her.

But for us, the silence wasn't peaceful; it was incomplete.

“It’s too easy,” Chloe said one evening, scrolling endlessly through her phone at the kitchen table. She’d been obsessively checking Chris’s non-existent social media, looking for any sign of life. “Guys like him don’t just disappear. They fester.”

“He’s probably shacked up with Darla, crying into his beer,” Ben muttered from the couch, where he was pretending to watch TV. His gaze, however, kept flicking towards the front door, a silent sentinel standing a post he’d never officially been assigned.

I knew they were right. The first move had been a success, a single, satisfying cut. But it wasn't the final blow. I thought of his smug, entitled voice on the phone, blaming our mother for his betrayal. A man wants a legacy. The memory was a whetstone, sharpening my resolve.

“We need to know where he is,” I said, pulling out my phone. “We can’t protect Mom if we’re blind.”

Chloe looked up. “Who are you calling? You can’t ask Betty again. You’ll spook her.”

“I’m not going to ask,” I said, dialing the familiar number. “I’m going to thank her.”

Betty picked up on the second ring. I pitched my voice low, filled with a son’s earnest gratitude. “Betty, it’s Alex Taylor again. I just wanted to call and thank you. My mom… she’s finally getting some peace. We’re so grateful you handled it so quickly and discreetly.”

“Of course, Alex,” she said, her voice softening. “Your family has always been good to us. I was just sorry it came to that.”

Here was my opening. “We are too,” I sighed, injecting a note of weary resignation. “We just hope he gets the help he needs. I hate to think of him out on the street, you know? Hopefully, he landed on his feet somewhere.”

It was a carefully baited hook, dangling the irresistible lure of gossip to a woman who now felt complicit in our family drama. She took it.

“Well, between you and me,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “the district manager has a soft spot for sob stories. Chris convinced him it was all a misunderstanding, a messy breakup getting out of hand. He gave him a second chance.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. “He did?”

“Transferred him,” Betty confirmed. “Gave him the same store manager position out at the Westlake branch. Said a change of scenery might do him good.”

I thanked her again and hung up, my hand tightening on the phone. Westlake. A sprawling suburb just an hour’s drive away. He hadn’t been vanquished. He had been relocated. He was rebuilding the exact same life, with his new family, on the foundation of a lie, just down the road.

“What is it?” Chloe demanded, seeing the look on my face.

“He’s in Westlake,” I said. “Same job. Same company. They just moved him.”

Chloe shot to her feet, her chair scraping harshly against the linoleum. “Are you kidding me? They rewarded him?” The brief sense of victory we’d felt evaporated, replaced by a scalding, renewed rage. “That’s it. I’m calling the district manager myself. I’ll tell him everything. About Darla, the baby, all of it.”

“No,” I said firmly, standing to face her. Ben sat up, his attention fully on us now. “You do that, and you show our hand. Chris will know it was us. It becomes a public fight, exactly what we promised Mom we would avoid. We need another way. A way that can’t be traced back here.”

My eyes fell on Ben. Big, quiet, and with a face Chris had barely bothered to learn. He was the perfect ghost.

“What’s his biggest, most predictable weakness?” I asked.

“Besides being a narcissistic scumbag?” Chloe shot back.

“He’s a functioning alcoholic,” I said. “And he’s arrogant. He thinks he’s getting away with it.”

The new plan bloomed in my mind, cold and precise. An anonymous tip was too easy to ignore. A direct confrontation was too risky. But a concerned citizen? A random guy who just happened to see something unsettling? That was plausible. Deniable. Perfect.

Two days later, Ben was sitting in our beat-up sedan in the sprawling parking lot of the Westlake ValueMart. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, feeling, in his own words, “like a spy in a bad movie.” I was on the phone with him, a nervous energy thrumming through the line.

“See anything?” I asked.

“Just a lot of minivans,” Ben reported. “Wait. Red pickup just pulled into an employee spot. It’s him.”

We waited. The lunch hour was Chris’s weak point, the time he could slip away for a quick nip without anyone noticing. It was a pattern we’d observed for months. Sure enough, after a few minutes, Ben’s voice came back over the line, tight with disgust.

“He’s doing it. Leaned the seat back. He just pulled out a flask.”

“Okay, Ben. You know what to do. You’re just a guy. You’re worried. Go.”

“On it.” He hung up.

Inside our own kitchen, Chloe and I waited, the silence stretching for an eternity. Ben wasn't a planner or a talker; he was a doer. But this was different. This was deception, manipulation. It was our world, not his.

Twenty minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was Ben. “Done. I told the manager. Some guy in a cheap suit. He looked more annoyed than anything, but he wrote it down. I don’t know if he believed me.”

“You did great, Ben. Just come home.”

The next few days were agonizing. We’d planted the seed of doubt, but we had no idea if it had taken root. The quiet in the house started to feel like the prelude to failure.

Then, on Friday evening, my phone rang. It was Betty. Her voice was strained, angry.

“Alex, I don’t know what you and your siblings are up to, and frankly, I don’t want to know,” she said, dispensing with any pleasantries. “But Chris was fired from the Westlake store this morning. The manager smelled liquor on him after a ‘customer complaint’ earlier in the week. Chris caused a huge scene, started screaming that he was being set up, that his ex’s kids were out to get him. He made a fool of himself. Don’t call me again. My family’s debt is paid.”

She hung up before I could reply.

A savage, triumphant grin spread across my face. I looked at Chloe and Ben. “He’s out. He blew up on his way out the door. Blamed us.”

Chloe let out a whoop of laughter, a raw, joyous sound that had been absent for weeks. Ben allowed himself a small, hard smile. We had done it. We’d cut his last lifeline. Now he was truly adrift, with no job, no income, and a baby on the way. The victory was absolute.

The celebration lasted until ten o’clock that night.

Chloe was the first to see it. She was pulling into our driveway after getting late-night groceries. Her headlights swept across the quiet suburban street, illuminating the rows of sleeping houses. And then they caught it. Parked just past our house, half-hidden in the shadows of a large oak tree, was a familiar, battered red pickup truck. The engine was off. The lights were out.

A chill colder than the night air washed over her. She could just make out the silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat, head facing forward, watching our house.

She fumbled with her keys, her heart hammering against her ribs, and scrambled inside, slamming and locking the door behind her.

“He’s here,” she breathed, her face pale. “Outside.”

Ben and I were at the living room window in an instant, peering through a gap in the blinds. The red truck was still there. A tiny red glow flared in the darkness of the cab—the tip of a cigarette. A ghost in our rearview mirror had become a predator at our gate.

We had stripped him of everything, and in his desperation, the man who blamed everyone but himself had come looking for the source of his problems. The war was no longer a series of clean, remote strikes. We had poked the beast, and now it was sitting outside our cave, waiting. And upstairs, our mother slept, blissfully unaware that the consequences of our revenge were parked right outside her window.