Chapter 9
Life got… normal.
Weird, right?
After everything we’d been through, normal felt like a gift.
Dad started his own construction company.
Hale Construction.
Marcus was his foreman.
They were good together.
Dad handled the books and the clients.
Marcus handled the crews and the actual building.
Within six months, they had three full-time crews and more work than they could handle.
Noah started second grade.
He made friends.
Joined the soccer team.
He was still small for his age—two years of malnutrition had stunted him a little—but the doctors said he’d catch up.
Eventually.
I started my junior year of high school.
I made friends too.
Real ones.
Girls who didn’t know about Melissa or Rebecca or the trials.
Girls who cared about homework and movies and which boys were cute.
For the first time in two years, I got to be just Emma.
Not Emma the survivor.
Not Emma the victim.
Just Emma.
I even started dating.
A boy named Tyler from my math class.
Sweet.
Funny.
Played guitar.
Marcus insisted on meeting him first.
Said he needed to “interview” anyone who took his niece out.
Tyler showed up at the door in a button-down shirt, shaking so bad he could barely speak.
Marcus grilled him for twenty minutes.
About his grades.
His parents.
His intentions.
Whether he knew how to change a tire.
Finally, Marcus nodded.
“Okay. You can take her. But I want her home by ten. And if you so much as look at her wrong, I will find you. And trust me—you don’t want me to find you.”
Tyler practically ran to the car.
I punched Marcus in the arm.
“Did you have to scare him that bad?”
Marcus grinned.
“Scared is good. Scared means he’ll behave.”
Tyler did behave.
Mostly.
And he never once complained about my crazy family.
Not even when Marcus showed up at the movies and sat two rows behind us “just in case.”
That Christmas was the best one ever.
We put up a real tree.
The biggest one we could find.
Marcus and Dad argued for an hour about how to put the star on top.
Noah “helped” by dropping ornaments every three seconds.
We spent Christmas morning in our pajamas, opening presents.
Noah got a bike.
A new game system.
Every toy he’d ever looked at twice.
Dad got new tools for the business.
Marcus got a new rifle.
I got a car.
Used.
A little Honda Civic.
But it was mine.
And for the first time, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted.
No one controlling me.
No one locking me in.
Freedom.
We should have known it wouldn’t last.
Nothing good ever does, right?
It was a Tuesday in March.
I was at school.
Tyler was walking me to chemistry when the office called me over the intercom.
“Emma Hale to the office. Emma Hale.”
Tyler squeezed my hand.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
But it wasn’t.
Dad was waiting for me in the office.
His face was white.
“Dad? What’s wrong? Is it Noah?”
“Noah’s fine. He’s with Marcus. It’s… it’s Detective Alvarez. She needs us at the station. Now.”
At the police station, Detective Alvarez was waiting in an interrogation room.
She didn’t look good.
Tired.
Worried.
“What is it?” Dad said as soon as we sat down.
She slid a piece of paper across the table.
A court document.
“Melissa has appealed. The court of appeals granted her a new trial.”
The room spun.
“What? How? She was guilty! There was so much evidence!”
Detective Alvarez nodded.
“I know. And ninety-nine percent of the time, that appeal would’ve been denied. But she got a new lawyer. A very good one. Paid for, we think, by some anonymous donor. He found a technicality. The warrant for her phone—there was a mistake in the judge’s signature. The appeals court ruled the phone was inadmissible. All the evidence from it. The texts. The messages to the other husbands. The proof of the other marriages. Gone.”
I felt sick.
“Without the phone,” she continued, “the prosecution’s case is weaker. They still have Noah’s 911 call. They still have the medical records. They still have the other victims. But without the phone showing premeditation… the maximum sentence she can get now is twenty years. And with good behavior, she could be out in twelve.”
“Twelve years,” Dad whispered. “She’d be in her fifties. She could come after us again.”
Detective Alvarez leaned forward.
“That’s not all. Rebecca’s conviction is being appealed too. Same technicality. Same lawyer. If she wins, she could be out in as little as five.”
Five years.
Noah would be eleven.
I’d be twenty-one.
Rebecca would be out.
And she’d want revenge.
“There’s more,” Detective Alvarez said. She looked like she hated being the bearer of bad news. “We got a tip last night. Someone has been asking about you. Asking where you live. Where the kids go to school. We don’t know who yet. But it’s someone connected to Melissa and Rebecca. Someone on the outside.”
I thought about the anonymous donor paying for the lawyer.
Who would do that?
Who had that kind of money?
And that kind of loyalty to two women like Melissa and Rebecca?
Then I remembered.
Detective Alvarez had said there were four husbands total.
Three others besides Dad.
Two were cooperating.
The third…
Thomas Whitmore.
The one who’d driven off a cliff.
The one whose body was never found.
“Detective,” I said. “The third husband. Thomas Whitmore. You said his body was never found.”
She nodded.
“What if he didn’t die?”
Silence.
Dad stared at me.
“Emma, what are you saying?”
“What if Rebecca didn’t kill him? What if she helped him fake his death? What if he’s the one paying for the lawyers? What if he’s been helping them this whole time?”
Detective Alvarez was already reaching for her phone.
“I need to make a call.”
She left the room.
Dad turned to me.
“You think he’s alive?”
I thought about everything I knew.
Melissa had married four men.
Four families.
Four sets of kids.
Thomas had been the one before Dad.
He’d filed for divorce.
Then he’d “died.”
Rebecca had identified the car.
No body.
No DNA.
Just a car at the bottom of a cliff.
And a life insurance policy.
Half a million dollars.
Paid to Melissa as the “grieving widow.”
She’d used that money to move here.
To meet Dad.
To start over.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that Thomas Whitmore is very much alive. And I think he’s been in on it from the beginning. All of it. The marriages. The fraud. The abuse. Everything.”
Detective Alvarez came back in.
May you like
Her face was grim.
“You were right. We just pulled Thomas Whitmore’s credit report. He’s been using an alias for the last four years. Lives in Seattle. And he just bought a plane ticket. Lands here tomorrow at noon.”
