Chapter 5
Monday morning came too fast.
I was up at six, changing the baby’s diaper, when Jake knocked on the door.
“Marquez is here,” he said. “Said she’d drive you to the precinct. I’ll watch the little guy. Don’t worry about a thing.”
I strapped my son into his bouncy seat in the living room. He was staring at the ceiling fan, fascinated.
“Be good for Uncle Jake,” I told him.
He gurgled.
I walked outside.
Marquez was leaning against her unmarked car, drinking coffee. She looked tired. Like she hadn’t slept much either.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Least I could do,” she said. “We got a lot to go over. The DA is already talking murder one for both of them. The evidence is that solid.”
We got in the car.
“The autopsy,” I said. “How long had she been poisoned?”
“About seventy-two hours,” Marquez said. “Starting the night she tried to leave. They crushed the pills into her tea. Into her food. Into anything she would eat or drink. It’s a terrible way to go, Ryan. Your heart just… gets slower and slower. Until it stops. She would have been conscious the whole time. Scared. Confused. In terrible pain.”
I stared out the window.
“And the baby?”
“Same stuff, just smaller doses. Probably to keep him quiet while they were… busy with her.”
I didn’t say anything.
There were no words.
We got to the precinct twenty minutes later.
The station was busy. Cops in uniform. People in handcuffs. Phones ringing. Marquez led me past it all to an interview room in the back.
The room was small. Windowless. A metal table. Two chairs. A one-way mirror on the wall.
“Have a seat,” she said. “I’m going to record this. It’s just a formality. We already have most of what we need from the video. But your testimony will seal it.”
She turned on the recorder.
“State your name for the record.”
“Ryan Michael Carter.”
“Date of birth?”
“March seventeenth, nineteen ninety-two.”
“Mr. Carter, can you describe in your own words what happened when you returned home from military deployment on the morning of July nineteenth?”
I told her.
Everything.
Again.
It was easier this time. Less raw. More like I was talking about someone else’s life.
When I finished, she turned off the recorder.
“Good,” she said. “That’s perfect. Now—there’s something else I need to tell you. Something about your brother.”
I leaned forward.
“What about him?”
“He’s been talking,” she said. “Since we locked him up yesterday. He’s scared. He’s already asked for a deal. He’s willing to testify against your mother in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“Reduced how much?”
“Twenty years instead of life. With good behavior, he could be out in twelve.”
I thought about it.
Kevin was weak. Stupid. Easily led. He had always been my mother’s puppet. Even as kids—if something broke, if something went wrong, it was always Kevin who took the blame, because Margaret told him to.
But he was still there.
He still held Emily down while my mother poured the poison down her throat.
He still drugged my son.
He still watched her die and did nothing.
“Let him talk,” I said. “If his testimony puts her away forever, let him have his twenty years. But I want you to make sure the judge knows exactly what he did. Every detail. I want him to wake up every morning for the rest of his life knowing what he helped do to my wife.”
Marquez nodded.
“I’ll make sure of it,” she said.
She stood to leave.
“One more thing,” I said. “The life insurance policy. The one my mother forged. Is there any way to stop the payout?”
“Already done,” she said. “I called the company Saturday morning. Put a fraud alert on the account. They’re not paying a cent to anyone. The money goes to you, as the original beneficiary. One million dollars. Minus taxes, of course.”
A million dollars.
Emily’s blood money.
I didn’t want it.
But I knew what I had to do with it.
“Thanks,” I said.
We left the interview room.
As we walked down the hall toward the exit, I passed the holding cells.
Through the bars, I saw my mother.
She was sitting on a bench, still in her black funeral dress. Her hair was a mess. Her makeup was gone. She looked old. Tired. Beaten.
She saw me through the bars.
She stood up and walked to the door.
“Ryan,” she called. Her voice was hoarse. “Ryan, talk to me. Please. I’m your mother.”
I stopped.
I turned to face her.
“You stopped being my mother the day you put that first pill in Emily’s tea,” I said. “You’re just a stranger to me now. A stranger who’s going to die in prison.”
“I did it for us,” she whispered. “For the family. For you.”
“You did it for Kevin’s gambling debts,” I said. “You did it for a million dollars. You did it because you’re a selfish, evil woman who would kill her own husband and her own daughter-in-law just to keep her lifestyle. And now you’re going to rot in a cell for it. And the worst part? Nobody is going to visit you. Nobody is going to care. You’re going to die alone. Just like you made Emily die.”
I turned and walked away.
She screamed after me.
Cursed me.
Called me every name in the book.
I didn’t look back.
Jake was waiting for me outside the precinct. He had the baby in his car seat in the back of his truck.
“All done?” he asked.
“All done.”
“Good. There’s someone here to see you.”
He nodded toward the bench by the door.
A woman was sitting there. Mid-thirties. Dark hair. Same eyes as Emily.
She stood when she saw me.
“Ryan,” she said. “I’m Sarah. Emily’s sister. I drove up from Savannah as soon as I heard. I’ve been trying to reach you since Saturday.”
I walked over to her.
We hugged.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, crying into my shoulder. “I should have been here. She called me three days before she died. She was crying. She said Margaret was keeping her locked up. I thought it was just pregnancy hormones. I told her to rest. I told her it would be okay. I should have come. I should have done something.”
I pulled back.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “She didn’t tell you everything. She was trying to protect you. She knew what Margaret was capable of.”
Sarah wiped her eyes.
“I want to help,” she said. “With the baby. With the trial. With whatever you need. Emily was my little sister. I owe her that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We could use all the help we can get.”
We went back to Jake’s house.
Sarah held the baby for an hour, just crying and rocking him.
“He looks just like her,” she said. “Same eyes. Same little nose.”
That afternoon, we went through the boxes of Emily’s things that the police had released from the house. Her clothes. Her books. Her jewelry.
At the bottom of the last box, under a stack of her old maternity shirts, I found a stack of letters.
Thirteen of them.
Each one was sealed.
Each one had a name written on the envelope in Emily’s handwriting.
To Ryan.
To Our Son, First Birthday.
To Our Son, Fifth Birthday.
To Our Son, Tenth Birthday.
To Our Son, High School Graduation.
To Our Son, Wedding Day.
And on and on.
All the way up to his fortieth birthday.
She had written them while I was gone.
One for every major milestone in his life.
For every day she wouldn’t be there for.
I opened the one addressed to me.
My Dearest Ryan,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone. And I know you. I know you’re blaming yourself. I know you’re thinking if you had been home, if you had been there, you could have stopped it.
Don’t.
None of this is your fault.
Margaret was broken long before I came along. She would have found another way. Another excuse. Another victim. That’s who she is. That’s who she has always been.
You have to let the guilt go, baby. You have to be strong for our son. He needs his father. He needs the man I fell in love with—the man who would carry me through rainstorms, who would sing off-key to me in the shower, who promised me we would have a house full of kids and a dog and a porch swing when we were old.
You can still have that.
Not with me.
But with someone.
Someday.
Don’t close yourself off. Don’t spend the rest of your life angry. I don’t want that for you. I want you to be happy. I want you to laugh again. I want you to watch our son grow up and be proud of the man he becomes.
Raise him to be kind.
Raise him to be honest.
Raise him to be nothing like the woman who took me from us.
And when he’s old enough, tell him about me. Tell him the good things. Tell him how we met at that stupid coffee shop where I spilled latte all over your uniform. Tell him how you proposed in the rain because you were too nervous to wait for a sunny day. Tell him how much I loved him—how I talked to him every night, how I sang to him, how I dreamed about what he would look like.
He is the best thing we ever did.
You are the best thing that ever happened to me.
I love you.
Forever.
No matter what.
— Emily
I sat on the floor of Jake’s guest room and read that letter until the words blurred.
Sarah found me there a few minutes later.
She didn’t say anything.
She just sat down next to me and put her arm around my shoulder, and we cried together for the woman we both loved.
That night, after Sarah went to a hotel and Jake was asleep, I sat in the living room with my son in my arms.
The house was quiet.
I thought about the million dollars.
I thought about the letters.
I thought about the trial that was coming.
And I made a decision.
I was going to use the money to start a foundation.
For women trapped in abusive families. For women whose in-laws controlled them. For women who had nowhere else to turn.
Emily’s Voice, I would call it.
And every year, we would help hundreds of women get out. Get safe. Get their lives back.
Margaret had killed Emily for money.
I was going to use that same money to make sure no other woman ever died the way she did.
It was the only thing that made any of this bearable.
The only thing that gave her death meaning.
May you like
I kissed my son on the forehead.
“Your mom was amazing,” I whispered. “The most amazing woman who ever lived. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure the whole world knows it.”
