Chapter 3
I paced the ER waiting room for three hours.
Clara sat in a plastic chair, watching me, her face tight. She’d called her husband to come get her, told him to stay with their kids, that she wasn’t leaving until we knew Elena and the baby were okay.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Maria, my company’s accountant, the only person I’d trusted enough to authorize the audit before I left the UAE.
Audit done. Call me ASAP.
I stepped outside, the cold Dallas night air hitting my face, and called her.
“Daniel,” she said, her voice tight. “You need to sit down for this.”
“I’m already sitting,” I said. “Just tell me.”
“Over the last 18 months, Ethan siphoned four hundred and twelve thousand dollars from the company’s offshore account. Small transfers at first, then bigger ones. Most of it went to cash withdrawals. The rest? Payments to an online gambling site registered in your mom’s name.”
My stomach dropped. Four hundred thousand dollars. All the money I’d worked 18 months of overtime to make. All the money that was supposed to pay for Elena’s maternity leave, for our new house, for our son’s college fund.
“Is there any proof?” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Emails between Ethan and your mom,” Maria said. “They talked about how stupid you were to trust him, how they’d keep taking a little at a time until you came home, then convince you to let him run the company full time so they could empty it completely. The last email was three days ago. From your mom to Ethan. It says ‘She found the statements. We have a problem.’”
Three days ago. The day Elena “died.”
I hung up, my hands shaking so bad I could barely hold the phone.
Elena had found out. She’d found the embezzlement, confronted them, and they’d hurt her to shut her up.
A doctor came out then, wearing blue scrubs, a mask pulled down under his chin. He looked tired, his eyes red.
“Mr. Carter?” he said.
I stood up so fast my head spun. “Is she okay? Is the baby okay?”
“Your wife has a broken hyoid bone from strangulation,” he said, his voice gentle. “Severe dehydration, mild traumatic brain injury from lack of oxygen. We put her in a medically induced coma to reduce the swelling in her brain. She’s stable, but it’s too early to know if there’ll be any long-term damage.”
He paused, taking a breath.
“The baby is in distress. He’s 36 weeks, but your wife’s oxygen levels dropped too low for too long. We need to do an emergency C-section right now. Can you sign the consent forms?”
I signed them without reading a word. I’d have signed my own life away if it meant keeping them safe.
Twenty minutes later, I heard it.
A loud, strong cry, echoing down the hallway.
My son.
A nurse brought him out a few minutes later, wrapped in a pink blanket, his face scrunched up, his little fists waving in the air.
“Six pounds, two ounces,” she said, smiling as she handed him to me. “Perfect Apgar scores. He’s a little early, but he’s strong. Just needs to spend a night or two in the NICU for observation.”
I held him against my chest, his tiny body warm through the blanket, and cried. He had Elena’s nose, my chin, a little tuft of dark brown hair on the top of his head.
I named him Liam Michael. Michael, after Elena’s dad, who’d died when she was 16. The man she’d always said she wanted our son to be like.
I carried him down the hall to Elena’s room. She was still unconscious, tubes coming out of her arms, a monitor beeping steady beside her bed.
I sat down next to her, put Liam’s tiny hand in hers.
“Look what we made,” I whispered to her, my voice breaking. “He’s perfect, Elena. He looks just like you. You have to wake up and meet him. You have to. I can’t do this without you.”
May you like
For a long second, nothing happened.
Then her index finger twitched. Just a little, curling around Liam’s tiny hand like she was holding on for dear life.
