Twice.
Voice memos.
Record.
I did not know if it had worked.
I could not check.
I could only lie there, still and silent and apparently dead, and hope that the small device on my wrist was doing what I could no longer do for myself: bearing witness.
And a moment later, believing me dead, my husband spoke the words that would, in time, put him in prison for the rest of his life.
“She’s gone,” Julian said, his voice hollow with a satisfaction that chilled me even through my fading consciousness.
“I did it, Selina.
Just like you said.
We’re free.” Just like you said. On my wrist, a small red light was recording every word.
Every word, and every name.
Just like you said, he had told her, and in those four words he had done what no amount of testimony from me could ever have done: he had placed Selina at the center of the plot, in his own voice, unprompted, believing no one would ever hear it.
He thought he was speaking to a corpse and a mistress, alone, unwitnessed, in a room where the truth belonged entirely to him.
He did not know that the quiet, agreeable wife he had just tried to erase had, with the last of her strength, made herself into the one thing his money and his power could not overcome: a witness that would not die.
And then the darkness took me.
Chapter 5 — Three Days Later
Three days later, I opened my eyes in the intensive care unit.
I was alive.
Against every expectation, including my own, and certainly against the expectations of the two people who had left me for dead, I had survived.
And I had barely finished registering the ceiling tiles and the beeping monitors and the tremendous ache in my body when the door of my room opened, and Julian walked in, carrying an enormous bouquet of white roses, looking disheveled and haggard, as though flowers could somehow repair what he had done.
“Nora,” he said.
But before he could take another step toward me, a doctor stepped smoothly between us, a composed, sharp-eyed man whose name, I would learn, was Dr.
Caleb Reed.
“Mr.
Vance,” he said.
“Before you come any closer, there is a medical reality you need to know.” Julian’s face darkened.
“I’m her husband,” he said.
“Get out of my way.” And Dr.
Reed did not move, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone cold as winter.
“Exactly,” he said.
“Which makes this all the more tragic.” He reached into my chart, and drew out an ultrasound image, and placed it on the tray between them, and on it, faint but unmistakable, were two tiny silhouettes.
And I understood, with a grief that eclipsed even the pain of my wounds, what the doctor was about to tell my husband, and what my husband, in his rage over a fabricated scratch, had destroyed.
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