Chapter 6
Harold Price found the recording two days later.
Not all of it.
A forty-seven-second audio file.
The filename was simply:
E.C._PRIVATE_03.
Andrew listened in Booth Three.
Elena’s voice filled the headphones.
For one second he had to close his eyes.
Eight months without hearing her.
Then suddenly she was breathing again in his ears.
“I keep starting this and deleting it.”
A pause.
“I don’t know how to tell Andrew without him thinking I’m asking him to choose sides.”
Another pause.
“I’m tired of being told everything is for family.”
Andrew gripped the edge of the desk.
Elena continued.
“Marcus thinks I don’t know about the invoices. Lucinda thinks I don’t notice what happens after she pours my drinks. And Andrew…”
The recording ended.
Andrew ripped off the headphones.
“That’s it?”
Harold nodded.
“The file ends there.”
“Why?”
“She may have stopped recording.”
“Or someone interrupted her.”
“Possible.”
Andrew played it again.
Lucinda thinks I don’t notice what happens after she pours my drinks.
Not drink.
Drinks.
Plural.
This had happened before.
Rachel requested the original file and server logs.
Harold preserved everything.
Andrew went home and opened Elena’s calendar from the final two months of her life.
He found four evenings when she had complained about sudden exhaustion afterward.
Once she canceled dinner.
Once she slept fourteen hours.
Once she missed Alex’s pediatric appointment and cried afterward because she had never missed one before.
Andrew remembered being irritated with her.
“You're pushing yourself too hard.”
He had said it as though fatigue were Elena’s personal failure.
Now nausea climbed into his throat.
Someone had been interfering with his wife while he criticized her for the symptoms.
At dinner, Alex unexpectedly spoke again.
Only two words.
“Mommy sleepy.”
Andrew stopped chewing.
Rachel Monroe had warned him not to seize every spontaneous sentence.
So he did not ask what Alex meant.
He simply said:
“I remember.”
Alex returned to his food.
Progress came like that.
Two words.
Then silence.
Later that night Andrew found an old photograph on his phone.
Elena asleep on the sofa three weeks before she died.
Alex curled beside her.
Lucinda standing in the background.
At the time Andrew had thought it was sweet.
Now he zoomed in.
On the side table near Lucinda sat Elena’s wineglass.
Andrew shut off the phone.
It proved nothing.
That was the torment.
Once suspicion entered a memory, every object started looking like evidence.
Andrew needed facts.
The next fact came from the restoration invoices.
Elena had not merely questioned Marcus’s contractors.
May you like
She had scheduled a board review of them.
For the morning after she died.
