Chapter 5
I locked the hospital room door behind me.
The only sound in the room was my own steady breathing.
My hands still shook, and it wasn't fear. It was what a person felt right before a lid came off.
I woke up the phone screen.
On the simple wallpaper, all the app icons were neatly arranged.
There were messages, photos, notes, and a handful of banking and investment apps I didn't recognize.
I took a deep breath and tapped on the photo album first.
The latest photo was taken just three days ago.
The background was blue water and blue sky, and David had his arm around a woman on the sand.
He was grinning wide, and I had never once seen that smile in eight years.
I knew that woman.
I would have known her anywhere.
Vanessa Carter.
She was the first love he had carried around for eight years.
In the photo, Vanessa wore a bikini and leaned into him with a huge diamond on her hand.
I clicked on the next photo.
They were kissing on a yacht.
I clicked again.
They were in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel, wrapped in bathrobes, drinking champagne.
The album held thousands of photos and covered every stolen moment of the last few years.
They went to the islands and the cities, every place I had pointed out in a magazine and asked him about.
It turned out, it was never about him hating travel.
He just never wanted to go anywhere with me.
My chest ached in that sour, hollow way.
But I didn't cry.
I'd already cried all my tears when he kicked me out of his car.
I closed the album and opened the chat app.
Vanessa sat pinned at the top of his list under the name Babe.
My thread sat at the very bottom with no name attached to it at all.
Their messages turned my stomach.
They sent each other explicit, flirty texts.
David complained to her about how boring I was, called me a worn-out housewife, and called the kids dead weight.
David: [Babe, just hang on a little longer.]
David: [When I get back from this trip, I'll move the money into our joint account overseas.]
David: [Then I'll lay it out for her and make sure she walks away with nothing.]
David: [I already talked to a lawyer. The house is premarital, the car is in my name, and she hasn't earned a dollar in eight years. The court will make me pay her a little compensation and that's all.]
David: [167 thousand dollars, and that's like tossing change to a beggar.]
David: [Then we go overseas and get married and never come back.]
That was the last thing David sent Vanessa the day before the accident.
Vanessa answered him.
Vanessa: [You're so good to me. I'll be waiting.]
She finished it off with a kiss emoji.
So that was how it worked.
His so-called business trip was really about clearing out the last of our family money.
He had mapped all of it out so the kids and I would go out the door like trash.
But he probably never saw this coming.
He never got his happily-ever-after with his mistress.
Instead, he ended up dead at the bottom of a ravine.
And every secret he had worked so hard to hide was sitting in the hands of the worn-out housewife he despised.
I kept scrolling.
In the phone's notes, I stumbled on something even crazier.
There was a detailed log of how David had used his position to move company money into his own pockets, year after year.
Every single transaction, transfer date, and offshore account was spelled out, clear as day.
The total was an astronomical number, and just reading it made my head swim.
At the end of the notes, there was a screenshot of an insurance contract.
It was a life insurance policy worth 6.7 million dollars.
David was the policyholder.
Vanessa was the beneficiary.
Staring at that insurance contract, I suddenly felt a chill run through me.
This wasn't just an affair.
It felt more like a murder plot that had been brewing for years.
It wasn't a plan to kill me.
It was something else, and I couldn't yet see the shape of it.
A terrifying thought flashed through my mind, gone before I could even catch it.
I shook my head, forcing myself to calm down.
There was no point in thinking about it now.
I found a cloud storage app.
I started uploading every photo, chat, note, and file from my phone, backing them up one by one.
These weren't just secrets.
These were my hand and my opening shot.
They would bury every person who had hurt me and schemed against me.