Chapter 1 - The Voice on the Other Side
Lucia hesitated outside the master bathroom door, her hands wringing a soft cotton dish towel. “He said he was at the downtown office, Mrs. Cross. Something about an urgent container manifest arriving from Rotterdam. But... Mr. Cross didn't sound like he was at his desk. I heard music in the background. Jazz. And glassware.”
Grace looked down at the three positive tests arrayed on the marble vanity. The silver lines seemed to mock her, mocking the quiet life she had tried to build inside a fortress of glass and dark money.
“Thank you, Lucia,” Grace said, her voice steadying through sheer force of will. “You can go home early tonight. The storm is getting worse.”
“Are you sure, ma’am? Mr. Damien might want dinner when he gets back—”
“He won’t,” Grace interrupted quietly. “He won’t be home for hours.”
She slipped the pregnancy tests into her purse along with her passport—an instinctual precaution she couldn’t quite explain, though she had packed it that afternoon after finding a hotel receipt for the Drake Hotel in Damien’s suit pocket, billed for two. The name on the reservation wasn’t hers. It was Victoria Vance, a lobbyist who frequently negotiated with the city council on behalf of Cross Atlantic Freight.
Grace had spent three hours staring at that receipt, wondering if she should pack a bag or wait for him to look her in the eye and lie. When he called an hour later to say he was stuck at the docks, she made her decision. She couldn’t stay in this cavernous Winnetka mansion another minute with the ghosts of the promises he had made her. She needed air. She needed her sister Clara.
She had grabbed her keys, driven out into the worsening November gale, and headed south toward the city.
And then came the headlights.
A black SUV, running without lights on a slick curve of Lake Shore Drive, had drifted across two lanes and slammed directly into her driver’s side door. The airbags deployed with a sickening pop, the chassis crumpled like tin foil, and the world dissolved into noise, glass, and pain.
That was when the calls began.
One. Two. Three.
Each time Damien’s phone rang, Grace imagined him sitting in a leather-paneled lounge or a private suite at the Drake, his phone buzzing against the table while he laughed at something Victoria Vance said. By call number seven, her ribs felt like shards of broken glass. By call number ten, the metallic taste of blood filled her mouth.
On the twelfth call, when the line went dead for the final time, she realized the horrifying truth. Damien wasn't just busy. He was choosing.
May you like
Now, trapped in the wreckage with rain pouring through the shattered windshield, she clicked stop on her voice recorder. She saved the audio file to an encrypted cloud folder linked to her sister’s email, setting it on a delayed auto-send timer for midnight. If she didn't cancel it, Clara would receive the raw, unedited confession of a dying wife and the damning proof of her husband's callous abandonment.
“Hold on, Grace,” she whispered to herself, pressing her palm against her lower abdomen. The pain was a white-hot fire, but beneath it, a tiny, stubborn pulse of life still fought to exist. “We’re not going to let him win.”
