Chapter 10 - THE LAST DRIVE
Emily recognized the phone before I showed her the message.
“Where did she get that?”
Her breathing changed. Dana called the nurse, then waited until Emily said she wanted to continue.
“I knew money was missing,” Emily said. “Before the crash.”
She had found payments to a vendor she didn't recognize. Ryan said she had no idea how the business worked anymore, which was a strange thing to say to the woman still covering shifts when someone called in sick.
“I asked him about it in the car.”
Rain. A dark road. Ryan driving home from a customer's office. Emily had started recording because arguments with him had a way of becoming different stories afterward.
“He said I'd made him feel small for years. In my own car, paid for by my own work, he told me I owed him.”
She remembered him reaching across for the phone.
Then tires on gravel.
The collision itself was a hole in her memory. She wouldn't fill it with guesses, even when I wanted an answer I could hate him for.
“I don't know if he meant to crash,” she said. “I know he wanted that recording.”
Ortiz arranged the meeting with Vanessa through attorneys. I wasn't invited.
By evening, the phone was in evidence, and Vanessa had begun giving a statement.
She said Ryan told her Emily would never recover. Then he said recovery was possible but Emily wanted no contact. Then he said his marriage had been over long before the crash.
“At what point did she ask Emily?” I said.
Nobody answered.
The phone had been in a box Ryan asked Vanessa to destroy when they moved her things into the house. She kept it after seeing money transfers that made her suspicious about her own accounts.
The recovered recording didn't contain the crash. It stopped minutes earlier, after Ryan managed to end it.
But his voice was clear.
“You don't walk away with the company and the kid. You understand me?”
Then Emily: “I'm not asking permission to leave you.”
I sat down slowly.
All those months, I had mourned a sister whose last choice I thought had been taken by a wet road.
She had been trying to get free.
Later, Ortiz called again. Vanessa had described something beyond the recording.
After the crash, while Emily lay unconscious, Ryan made another call before he called for help.
May you like
He called Vanessa.
And she had kept that voicemail, too.
