Detective Bennett watched him for a long second.
Then she said, “You need to come with us.”
“I didn’t hurt them,” Ryan said quickly.
“No one said you did.”
But the way she looked at him made it obvious that everyone was already thinking it.
At the police station, Ryan told the story again.
And again.
Each time, it sounded worse.
He had left his wife, ten days postpartum, alone with a newborn while she was actively bleeding and begging for help.
He had ignored her calls because, as his friends later admitted, he had said, “She’s trying to ruin my birthday.”
He had posted videos of himself drinking whiskey on a heated balcony while I was unconscious.
He had not called once.
Not once in three days.
By midnight, Ryan Parker was no longer just a terrified husband.
He was a suspect.
Detective Bennett placed a printed photo on the interrogation table.
It showed the nursery rug.
The blood.
The marks from crawling.
Ryan looked away.
“Look at it,” Bennett said.
“I can’t.”
“You should have looked when she asked you to.”
His breathing grew shallow.
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’ll get one. But before that happens, there is something you need to understand. If your wife died because you abandoned her during a medical emergency, this does not disappear because you say you were on vacation.”
Ryan covered his mouth with both hands.
For the first time, he cried.
Not quiet tears of grief.
Ugly, terrified sobs from a man beginning to realize that the story he had told himself about who he was might not survive the truth.
But while Ryan was being questioned under harsh fluorescent lights, I was alive.
Barely.
I woke up in a room I did not recognize.
A white ceiling.
Soft beeping.
A bitter taste in my mouth.
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