Chapter 2 - THE LETTER NO ONE SENT
At sunrise, Chicago wore the color of unpolished steel. Snow had stopped falling, but the sidewalks outside St. Matthew were dangerous under a thin glaze of ice. Nick had not slept. He sat in a plastic chair outside intensive care with his ungloved hands resting on his knees.
His men had been ordered home. Only Ava stayed, bringing him tea he didn't drink. She had known Emily since the wedding and still wore the inexpensive silver earrings Emily had given her when she finished nursing school. Ava was a physician assistant now, though she carefully avoided speaking over the treating doctors.
“Teresa said the letter is at her apartment,” Ava said. “She'll decide what to do with it.”
“Good.”
“You're not going to send someone there?”
“No.”
Ava looked at him. “That may be the first sensible answer I've heard from you in three months.”
Nick touched the wedding ring. “I thought if Emily hated me, they would leave her alone.”
“Who are they?”
“I don't know.”
“You never knew.”
He nodded.
“Then you turned uncertainty into a verdict on your marriage and sentenced her without telling her the charge.”
He flinched. Ava had always possessed their mother's ability to locate the painful center of a story.
“I know.”
“Don't say that unless you intend to act like you know.”
Detective Vega arrived with another investigator, Owen Bell, and a digital evidence specialist. Nick gave them permission to enter his downtown office with a warrant if they preferred. Vega chose to have him arrange the safe's opening in their presence while her team documented the contents. Simon looked offended when they searched the room; Nick told him to remain silent.
Inside the safe were two threatening envelopes, three photographs of Emily, and a memory card delivered a week before the divorce. Nick had never played the card. The accompanying note said only: Be a better husband by becoming an ex-husband.
“You didn't view it?” Vega asked.
“I thought it was another image of someone watching her.”
“Or you were afraid to learn something that would complicate your choice.”
He met her gaze. “Both.”
Back at St. Matthew, Whitmore told Teresa and Daniel that Emily remained unconscious but stable enough to avoid emergency surgery for the moment. Repeat imaging showed the swelling had not significantly increased. The obstetric team continued monitoring the pregnancy and had explained that the mother's recovery took immediate priority. Nobody promised an outcome.
Teresa emerged and sat beside Nick without looking at him.
“When she was little, Emily would apologize to furniture,” she said. “She'd bump into a table and tell the table she was sorry. I thought she'd grow out of feeling responsible for everything.”
Nick stared at the floor.
“She stopped apologizing to furniture,” Teresa continued. “But then she married a man who could make a woman feel foolish for asking whether he'd loved her.”
He waited. This was not an opening for defense.
“Three weeks ago,” she said, “she told me she was frightened someone from your world would find out about the baby. She didn't want to go back. And she didn't want the child growing up with a lie at the center of its life.”
“I didn't know she was pregnant.”
“Of course you didn't. She didn't trust you with the truth after you weaponized yours.”
Teresa took an envelope from her handbag. Nick saw Emily's handwriting on the front: NICK — IF I DON'T FIND THE COURAGE.
She held it between two fingers as though testing its weight.
“I'm giving you this because she may need us to cooperate over a child. It isn't forgiveness.”
“I understand.”
“You may read it. You will not use it to tell her how she feels when she wakes.”
Nick took it carefully. He waited until Teresa had gone inside before opening the seal.
Nick,
I discovered the pregnancy nine days after the divorce was finalized. My first feeling wasn't anger. It was joy, so sudden I laughed alone in a drugstore parking lot. Then I remembered what you said to me in the kitchen and the joy became something I didn't know how to carry.
I'm not writing because I want to undo the divorce. I'm writing because I want our child to know the truth about us without having to choose which parent's pain matters more. For six years, I loved you. I won't pretend otherwise because you said our marriage was a lie. If it was a lie for you, then it wasn't one I knowingly told.
The night before you left, you held me while I slept. I remember waking to find you crying. You said it was nothing. I used to accept that answer from you. I don't anymore.
If you want to be a father, you'll need to become a man who tells the truth even when the truth costs him something. I can't do that work for you.
Emily.
Nick folded the letter twice, then unfolded it, afraid a crease might erase something. He had cried that last night. He'd stood in the bathroom with the threatening envelope in his hands, thinking he could protect Emily by destroying their marriage before anyone else could destroy her body.
He read the sentence again: I can't do that work for you.
At noon, Vega called with the preliminary analysis of the memory card. It contained a short video shot in a parking garage. Emily was entering a grocery store. A man in a dark jacket stood behind a concrete pillar, watching her. The timestamp was eleven weeks old.
“Can you identify him?” Nick asked.
“Not from the face. He's angled away. But the background includes a service van registered to Briarstone Medical Transport.”
Nick knew that name. Briarstone had once supplied vehicles for one of his companies, Mitchell Logistics. The contract ended years earlier after allegations of fraudulent billing. Simon had overseen the cancellation.
“Simon knows that company.”
“We'll speak to him.”
“There's something else. The letter said the sender wanted me divorced. If somebody kept watching Emily after the divorce, maybe the divorce wasn't their goal.”
“That's one possibility,” Vega said. “Not a conclusion. Tell me about anyone who benefited financially from your separation.”
Nick thought of the prenuptial agreement, the trusts, and a charitable foundation Emily had helped establish to fund housing for families recovering from violence. She had refused to put his family name on the building. He'd admired her for it. He couldn't remember who handled the foundation's annual audit.
“Emily sat on the board of the Harbor Bridge Foundation,” he said. “The divorce changed her voting rights.”
“Who gained them?”
“I need to check.”
“No calls to alert anyone. Give us the documents.”
He asked his attorney to preserve and supply the relevant corporate records. When the lawyer began explaining executive privilege, Nick interrupted.
“I'm not asking how to hide them.”
The attorney fell silent.
Later that afternoon, Emily moved her fingers.
Whitmore warned the family that small responses did not mean she was awake or out of danger. Nick stood outside while Teresa spoke softly beside the bed. Emily's hand twitched again when her mother mentioned her childhood dog. It might have been reflexive. It might have meant something. The uncertainty hurt more than the waiting.
Nick found Ava in the cafeteria, pushing mashed potatoes around a plate.
“Do you remember the Harbor Bridge vote?” he asked.
Ava looked up. “Emily argued against selling the women's shelter property. She said the residents needed stable leases.”
“I remember.”
“You voted to sell anyway.”
“Simon told me the building needed structural repairs beyond the foundation's budget.”
“Emily found a contractor willing to do the work for less. You didn't read her report.”
Nick closed his eyes.
“She showed me,” Ava said. “I was there. She asked you to read page twelve. You told her Simon had it handled.”
“Page twelve.”
Ava set down her fork. “Your life has been built around people handling things so you never have to look closely. Emily looked closely. Maybe that's why someone wanted her frightened.”
That evening Detective Vega returned, holding a printout from hospital registration.
“Emily scheduled tomorrow's appointment herself,” she said. “But at eight fourteen last night, someone logged into her patient portal and canceled it. Ten minutes later, a second request restored it.”
“Could she have done that?”
“The access came from two different devices. One belonged to Emily. The other used a corporate network assigned to Mitchell Logistics.”
Nick felt the room tilt.
“Are you saying someone in my company logged into her account?”
“I'm saying we have a lead. Don't turn it into certainty until we've obtained the authentication records.”
Vega paused. “We also recovered the security recording from a neighboring office building. It shows a dark van near the garage at nine twenty-three.”
“Briarstone?”
“The registration is obscured.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Someone helped Emily after she fell. A figure appears briefly, then disappears before the maintenance worker arrives.”
Nick stared at her.
“She wasn't alone?”
“No.”
“Did they call an ambulance?”
“Not that we can establish.”
Vega turned the screen toward him. A grainy figure knelt beside Emily, lifted something from the ground, and looked toward the camera. For a single frame, the coat opened enough to reveal a pale rectangular badge.
Nick knew that badge design. His company issued them to senior managers.
And the figure wore the same distinctive silver watch Simon Rourke had received on his twentieth anniversary with the organization.
Nick's first impulse was to call Simon and demand answers. He caught his own hand before it reached the phone.
“Detective,” he said, “I think I recognize the watch. But I'd rather you determine whose it is.”
Vega nodded once. “That's the right answer.”
May you like
Outside, Chicago traffic moved through the night as though no family had been pulled apart. Nick returned to the intensive-care window and looked at the woman he had tried to protect by making himself a stranger.
This time, he would not substitute fear for evidence. Even if the evidence led to his closest friend.
