Chapter 14 - NATHAN’S TABLET
The tablet charged.
That alone made me furious.
Weeks of Cole calling it junk, and all it needed was time and a cable.
Marcus handled the extraction while I sat on Dana’s floor with Wren doing a puzzle she was too distracted to finish.
Forty minutes later, his message came through:
I have something.
Dana drove me back to Leah’s office like a woman taking someone to surgery.
Inside the tablet’s local cache were still images and short fragments from the security system. Most were incomplete.
One file was labeled only by timestamp.
March 21, 9:17 p.m.
It ran for sixteen seconds.
No audio.
Nathan stood at the kitchen counter with his pill organizer open.
He stepped out of frame.
Cole moved in.
Helen approached from the refrigerator side.
Cole uncapped a pill bottle, poured something into his palm, and Helen handed him another bottle.
Then the clip ended.
I stared at the frozen final frame until my vision blurred.
You still could not see every pill.
You still could not say, in a courtroom-perfect sentence, that this was the precise act that killed my husband.
But you could see them handling his medication when they later claimed they never touched it.
You could see Cole pouring something.
You could see Helen helping.
The room went silent except for my breathing.
Leah wrote down every file detail.
Marcus saved forensic copies.
Then Briggs called back to say she wanted the clip immediately.
For the first time, her voice had changed.
Not certainty.
Urgency.
That afternoon, she also got something else: a warrant request for Cole’s phone, based now on the clip, the deletion log, and the pharmacy records.
The system was finally moving.
Then it moved in the other direction too.
While I was at Leah’s office, someone broke into my house.
Not Dana’s.
Mine.
The back lock was damaged. Nathan’s den had been turned upside down. His desk drawers emptied. The hall closet with the original document box dumped across the floor.
Only one thing was missing.
Nathan’s laptop.
The one I rarely touched because the password had always belonged to him.
Cole had already learned about the tablet clip somehow, or he was sweeping every remaining device at once.
Maybe both.
The police documented the break-in.
No immediate suspect named publicly.
I didn’t need them to say Cole’s name for me to understand who wanted that laptop before investigators got around to asking.
Then Briggs called again near midnight.
“They searched Cole’s phone.”
“And?”
“They recovered deleted messages between him and Helen from the week Nathan died.”
I stopped breathing.
“What do they say?”
May you like
“One says, ‘He noticed the pills.’”
📖 The recovered kitchen clip finally put Cole and Helen at Nathan’s medication, and the deleted text from Cole’s phone proved they were already discussing the pills before Nathan ever died. 👇
