Chapter 2
The ambulance doors closed, but I could still hear my mother shouting my name.
Emily squeezed my hand.
Her fingers were cold.
“Daniel, the baby…”
“The paramedics are taking care of both of you.”
I tried to sound calm.
I failed.
The monitor beside her showed the baby’s heartbeat rising and falling too quickly.
A paramedic placed an oxygen mask over Emily’s face.
“How long was she in the kennel?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just found her.”
“Almost four hours,” Emily whispered.
My chest tightened.
Four hours.
My own mother had left my pregnant wife locked beneath the sun for four hours.
At the hospital, nurses rushed Emily into the maternity unit.
A doctor stopped me at the doors.
“You need to wait here.”
“She is my wife.”
“And we need room to help her.”
The doors closed between us.
I stood alone in the hallway with blood on my shirt and dirt on my knees.
Ten minutes later, a police detective approached me.
Her name was Detective Lena Ortiz.
She asked me to explain what I had seen.
I gave her access to every security recording around the house.
“Your mother says Emily attacked her first,” Ortiz said.
“She is lying.”
“The video supports you. But there is something else.”
She showed me a still image from the backyard recording.
Ryan was carrying a small bottle.
“Do you know what this is?”
I enlarged the image.
The label was partly hidden, but I recognized it.
It was medication prescribed to induce contractions.
Emily had been given the same drug during a previous medical procedure.
“Why did Ryan have that?”
“That is what we need to find out.”
My knees almost gave way.
They had not only humiliated Emily.
They might have planned to make her lose our baby.
The doctor finally came through the doors.
“Your wife is stable,” she said. “The baby is in distress, but we stopped the contractions for now.”
“For now?”
“She needs strict monitoring. Another serious episode could force an emergency delivery.”
I entered Emily’s room.
She looked small beneath the hospital blankets.
Bruises circled her wrists.
I kissed her forehead.
“I am sorry.”
She opened her eyes.
“You didn’t do this.”
“I left you alone with them.”
“You trusted your family.”
“I should have known.”
Emily turned her face away.
“There is something I didn’t tell you.”
My stomach dropped.
“What?”
“Your mother has been coming to the house whenever you travel. She told me you gave her permission.”
“I never did.”
“She went through our bedroom. She checked my phone. She kept asking about your grandfather’s trust.”
My grandfather had created a trust before he died.
The money would pass to me when my first child was born.
I had never cared about it.
My mother did.
She had mentioned it constantly since Emily became pregnant.
“What did she ask?”
“She wanted to know whether you had changed the beneficiary.”
I stared at her.
Three weeks earlier, I had changed it.
If anything happened to me, everything would go directly to Emily and our child.
Before that, Diane had been the secondary beneficiary.
“Did you tell her?”
“No. But she found papers in your office.”
A nurse entered and handed me Emily’s belongings.
Her phone was missing.
So was the key to my office safe.
I called Detective Ortiz.
She returned with two officers.
After Emily explained everything, Ortiz contacted the officers searching our house.
Twenty minutes later, she received a call.
Her expression hardened.
“The safe is open,” she said. “Several financial documents are gone.”
“Ryan took them.”
“Possibly. But your mother and brother are claiming someone else was there.”
“Who?”
Ortiz looked toward Emily.
“Your father.”
I had not spoken to my father in nearly six months.
Thomas Hale had spent most of his life obeying Diane.
He never challenged her.
He never protected anyone from her.
But according to a neighbor’s camera, his truck had been parked outside my house that afternoon.
I called him.
He answered after the first ring.
“Dad, were you at my house?”
Silence.
Then I heard him breathing heavily.
“Daniel, you need to listen to me.”
“Did you help them?”
“I tried to stop it.”
“Where are the documents?”
“I have them.”
My anger rose.
“Bring them to the police.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“Because those papers prove your mother has been stealing from you for years.”
Before I could answer, someone knocked on his door.
May you like
My father gasped.
Then the call ended.
