Chapter 8 - THE FIRST WIFE
I let Audrey into the kitchen.
She refused coffee.
Her hands shook too much to hold the mug.
“They separated,” she said. “That’s what Victoria told everyone.”
“When?”
“Two years ago.”
“Did they?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
Ruiz came back within an hour.
Audrey told her about Mason’s debts.
Victoria’s expensive apartment.
The money she sent their mother.
“She said she worked in commercial real estate.”
“She did,” I said.
I could barely get the words out.
“She worked in my wife’s office.”
Audrey looked at me.
“I thought you knew they knew each other.”
The kitchen went silent.
Ruiz asked for dates.
Names.
Messages.
Audrey handed over her phone voluntarily and sat staring at her empty hands.
“I saw your wedding picture online,” she told me. “Victoria said it was a private ceremony. She told me not to come because you didn’t want her family there.”
“She said you two weren’t close.”
“We weren’t. But not because of me.”
That afternoon, I took Lily to meet a child interview specialist named Kim.
She had a room with soft chairs and a box of animal figures.
I waited outside.
Every minute felt like a failure I couldn’t undo.
When Kim brought Lily out, my daughter ran to me.
“Can we go get fries?”
“Yes.”
“With the little red boxes?”
“Whatever you want.”
Kim asked Rosa to take her down the hall.
Then she spoke quietly.
“Lily said Victoria grabbed her arm several times before yesterday.”
My chest tightened.
“She said she was told you would be sad if you found out she was being ‘bad.’”
I leaned against the wall.
All those nights I had asked how her day went.
All those times she had said fine.
“She also described finding the phone under a cushion in the blue room. She tapped a video because she recognized her mother.”
“What did she see?”
Kim paused.
“She remembers Mommy saying, ‘Give it back, Mason.’”
Ruiz, standing beside me, looked up sharply.
Then Kim added the part that made my knees weaken.
“Lily said there was another voice.”
May you like
“A woman.”
“And she recognized it.”
