Chapter 12
I vomited into a hospital basin.
Not from pregnancy this time.
From finally understanding that my marriage had not fallen apart.
It had been built wrong from the beginning.
Bennett had not changed.
He had revealed.
Nora took the flash drive straight to Detective Vale.
My uncle stayed with me.
I asked him to tell me the truth.
All of it.
He did.
My mother, Evelyn Mercer, had distrusted the Halloways years before I met Bennett.
She had represented families ruined by their private equity deals.
She had warned Adrian to keep them away from Mercer Medical.
Then she died in a car crash when I was nineteen.
A crash ruled accidental.
I stared at him.
“No.”
His eyes filled.
“I never had proof.”
“But you suspected?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You were nineteen and grieving.”
“I married him.”
His face broke.
“I know.”
Anger flared.
At Bennett.
At Diane.
At my uncle.
At my mother for dying.
At myself for still wanting one memory of my marriage to be real.
Then Evelyn cried.
The sound cut through everything.
I reached for her.
The nurse placed her in my arms.
She was impossibly light.
Her tiny fingers curled around mine.
I looked at my uncle.
“We reopen my mother’s case.”
He nodded.
“I already called.”
Detective Vale returned that night.
He had traced the anonymous drive to someone inside Halloway Capital.
A former assistant named Priya Shah.
She had disappeared that afternoon.
Bennett claimed she stole company property.
Diane called her unstable.
That meant she was telling the truth.
Vale found Priya at a motel near Flagstaff with a cracked phone and a bag of documents.
She agreed to testify if protected.
Her first statement was simple.
May you like
“Bennett Halloway keeps a file on every woman he plans to destroy.”
Mine was labeled Asset Wife.
