Then Detective Bennett appeared.
She was a woman in her fifties with tired eyes and a voice that did not bend.
“Mr. Parker.”
“Where are they?” Ryan demanded. “Where’s my wife? Where’s my son?”
The detective studied him coldly. “Safe.”
“I’m her husband.”
“And you left her bleeding on a nursery floor for three days.”
His face collapsed.
“I didn’t know it was that serious.”
A door opened down the hall.
My sister Olivia stepped out.
Ryan froze.
He had always hated Olivia because she saw through him from the beginning. She had come to drop off soup that night. Instead, she found me unconscious, Ethan weak from crying, and blood beneath the door.
She called 911.
She saved us.
Ryan pushed past the detective. “Emma!”
I was sitting in a wheelchair at the end of the hall, pale but alive, Ethan sleeping against my chest.
Ryan began crying.
But then Olivia handed Detective Bennett his resort video.
And my lawyer stepped out behind her holding divorce papers.
PART 2
Ryan Parker stood motionless in the nursery doorway, staring at the bloodstain on the cream rug as though his brain could not process what his eyes were showing him.
The room felt unnaturally still.
The house that had always greeted him with familiar little sounds—the refrigerator humming, Emma’s quiet footsteps, Ethan’s newborn cries—had turned into an empty shell.
“Emma?” he called again.
His voice broke.
No answer came.
He stepped into the nursery carefully, the way a man might enter a crime scene before admitting the crime belonged to him.
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