Chapter 2 - THE WOMAN WHO DIED
Detective Ortiz arrested no one that afternoon.
Not yet.
She separated us, collected the mug fragments, prescription bottles, documents, hidden camera, and Helen’s phone.
Then she sent me to the hospital.
Luke tried to ride with me.
Ethan blocked him.
“You don’t get near her.”
Luke lifted both hands.
“I’m her husband.”
“You’re the reason she looks like that.”
At the emergency room, Dr. Naomi Carter examined my bruises and ordered a toxicology panel. She found traces of three sedatives, a heart medication I had never been prescribed, and a drug commonly used to interfere with memory formation.
Ethan sat beside me.
“I sent messages,” he said. “I called. Luke answered once and told me you were in treatment.”
“He showed me messages from you.”
“I never wrote them.”
Luke had cloned Ethan’s number.
The isolation had been deliberate.
Detective Ortiz arrived with a copy of my death certificate.
It was legally registered.
Eight years earlier, a woman identified as Natalie Parker had died in a private clinic after an overdose.
The body was cremated.
Luke had signed the identification form.
“I didn’t know him then,” I said.
Ortiz placed the marriage certificate beside it.
A courthouse clerk had certified our marriage ten months before the death.
The clerk was Helen’s cousin.
My photograph had been attached to both documents.
Ethan stared at me.
“You were missing for four months when you were twenty-three.”
I remembered almost nothing from that year.
My parents told me I had suffered a breakdown after college and stayed at a wellness center.
The center was owned by Dr. Marcus Vale.
Ortiz leaned closer.
“What do you remember about a lake house?”
A cold image passed through me.
Wooden walls.
A locked bedroom.
Helen’s patterned sweater.
Luke standing beside a dock.
Then nothing.
My monitor beeped faster.
Dr. Carter told Ortiz to stop.
Before she left, Ortiz handed me a card.
“Do not eat or drink anything brought by the Mercer family.”
That night, a nurse delivered a tray.
Soup.
Tea.
A ceramic mug.
The same pattern as Helen’s.
Ethan knocked it from the nurse’s hand.
The woman ran.
Hospital security caught her near the elevator.
She was not a nurse.
She was Helen’s daughter, Claire Mercer.
Luke had never told me he had a sister.
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Inside Claire’s purse was another brown bottle with my name.
And a photograph of me unconscious in a wedding dress beside Luke eight years earlier.
