1. Mr. Perfect

 

The squad room at the 17th Precinct of the NYPD was, for once, not a place of grim focus, but of lighthearted celebration. My name is Detective Sarah Jensen, and the source of my colleagues’ endless teasing was the diamond ring on my finger and my fast-approaching wedding.

“So, you finally running the background check on Mr. Perfect?” my partner, a grizzled veteran named Mike, joked as he dropped a stack of files on my desk. “Can’t have one of NYPD’s finest marrying a wanted fugitive, you know.”

I laughed, the sound easy and happy. “Please. Mark’s record is cleaner than my service weapon. This is just a formality.”

And it was. My fiancé, Markham “Mark” Thorne, was a brilliant and successful architect, a kind, gentle man who had brought a sense of peace and light into a life that was too often filled with darkness. He was, in every sense of the word, perfect.

The background check was the last bureaucratic hurdle, a departmental requirement before I took my leave for the wedding. It was a joke, a simple form to be filled out. As I looked at the paperwork, my eyes drifted to the old, framed photograph on my desk. It was of me and my older brother, David, taken a lifetime ago. His easy, confident smile was a constant, painful reminder of the event that had shaped my entire adult life: his unsolved, fatal hit-and-run fifteen years ago. It was the reason I became a cop. It was the vow I had made to myself—to find the justice he was never given.

2. A Routine Check

 

Later that night, the precinct had emptied out, leaving only the low hum of computers and the distant wail of a lone siren. It was the time I loved most, a time of quiet focus. I decided to get the last piece of wedding paperwork out of the way.

I poured myself a mug of stale coffee and sat down at my terminal, a smile on my face. My mind was a happy jumble of wedding plans—the seating chart, the first dance song, the honeymoon in Italy. I even had another browser tab open to the website of a beautiful vineyard upstate that was our top choice for the venue.

This was the last step. A simple formality. I typed his full name, Markham David Thorne, and his date of birth into the National Crime Information Center database. I hit ‘Enter,’ fully expecting the screen to return the two most beautiful words in the English language for a cop’s fiancé: “NO RECORD.” I took a sip of my coffee, my thoughts already drifting back to floral arrangements.

 

3. The Anomaly

 

The results page loaded in under a second. As expected, the first line read: NO ADULT CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND.

I was about to close the window when my eyes caught a second line, a small, anomalous entry just below the first.

ONE (1) SEALED JUVENILE RECORD — LEVEL 3 ACCESS REQUIRED.

My smile vanished. A cold, prickling sensation ran down my spine. Sealed juvenile records were common—stupid teenage mistakes like shoplifting or vandalism. But I had never seen one that required Level 3 access. That clearance was reserved for the most serious of felonies: murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping.

The detective in me, the part of my brain that never sleeps, began to whir. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. It’s nothing, the fiancée in me whispered. A joyriding incident that got out of hand. A bad fight after a high school football game.

But the detective knew better. Level 3 was a ghost. It meant something terrible had happened, something so severe it had been buried by the courts.

My heart began to pound, a slow, heavy drumbeat in the silent room. I entered my high-level authorization code and pressed ‘Enter.’

 

4. The First Ghost

 

The file unsealed. My blood ran cold. It was a case file from fifteen years ago, from a precinct in a wealthy suburb just outside the city.

CASE #77-B-9204 CHARGE: VEHICULAR MANSLAUGHTER (FATAL HIT AND RUN) PRIMARY SUSPECT: THORNE, MARKHAM. AGE: 17

The world tilted on its axis. I felt the air leave my lungs as if I’d been punched. Mark. My Mark. The gentle, kind man who held me when I had nightmares, the man who was terrified of spiders, was the prime suspect in a fatal hit-and-run?

I read on, my hands shaking, my training forcing me to absorb the details through a haze of disbelief. The vehicle, a luxury sedan, had belonged to his father. Mark had been at a party nearby that night. He’d had a weak alibi. But there were no other witnesses. The case had been dismissed, the file sealed, due to a lack of conclusive evidence placing him, specifically, in the driver’s seat. He had walked away.

My mind reeled. The man I was about to marry, the man I had given my whole heart to, had a ghost in his past. A terrible, dark secret he had never shared. Had he been lying to me this whole time? Was the perfect man I loved a facade, hiding the conscience of a killer who had gotten away with it?

 

5. The Second Ghost

 

Shaking, my heart a raw, open wound, I forced myself to continue. A good detective always sees a case through to the end. I scrolled down, my eyes blurring with tears I refused to let fall, until I reached the section on the victim. I had never bothered to cross-reference the names on random juvenile cases; there was no reason to. It was just a name. A stranger.

I clicked to unseal the victim’s file. A grainy, black-and-white photo from an old driver’s license appeared on the screen.

And my world stopped.

I knew that face. I knew that smile. It was the same smile that looked at me from the photograph on my desk every single day. The smile of a young man, barely twenty, with his entire life ahead of him.

My eyes dropped to the name typed in cold, block letters beneath the photo.

VICTIM: JENSEN, DAVID M.

David. My brother.

The case number. The date. The location on that dark, suburban road. The details I had memorized, the facts that had haunted my sleep for fifteen years, the cold case file that was the very bedrock of my career—it was all here. The man responsible for the defining tragedy of my life, the faceless monster I had vowed to find, the reason I wore a badge… was not some stranger.

He was the man I was going to marry.

 

6. The Unsolved Vow

 

I don’t know how long I sat there, frozen in the blue glow of the monitor, a silent scream trapped in my throat. The two halves of my life, the love I had found and the loss I could never overcome, had just collided in a cataclysm of impossible, cruel fate.

My phone buzzed on the desk, startling me from my trance. A text message. It was from Mark.

Thinking of you, my love. Can’t wait to spend forever with you. 

A wave of nausea washed over me. I looked at the loving message, then at the two files now open on my screen: the sealed record of Markham Thorne, and the cold case file of David Jensen.

The fiancée in me died in that moment. The tears of heartbreak and betrayal froze, hardening into something else. Something cold, and sharp, and diamond-hard.

The detective remained.

My hands, now perfectly steady, moved across the desk. I printed the entirety of Mark’s sealed juvenile file. I cross-referenced the case numbers, linking it officially to my brother’s case. I began to build a new file, my own file, connecting the dots that a suburban police department fifteen years ago had failed to connect.

I picked up my phone, my thumb hovering over his message. Then, I closed it. I opened my contacts and found the name of the retired sergeant who had first worked my brother’s case, a good man who had always felt it was the one that got away.

My fingers flew across the screen, my message short, precise, and professional.

Sarge, it’s Jensen. I have a new lead on my brother’s case. A strong one. Let’s meet. First thing in the morning.

I hit send. My wedding was in three weeks. But my vow was no longer to a man. It was to the ghost in the photograph on my desk. The hunt had begun.