Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Phone
By 4:30 AM, the surgical wing had settled into a haunted, fluorescent quiet.
I sat in the tiny call room adjacent to Trauma Bay 1, staring at the plastic property bag on the desk. Inside was everything Madison Vale had been carrying when Ethan dragged her through the doors: a shattered compact mirror, a pair of blood-crusted leather gloves, and her rose-gold smartphone. The screen was spider-webbed with cracks, but the green LED charging light blinked insistently from the portable power bank a nurse had plugged it into for police inventory.
My lawyer, Rebecca Vance, had texted me twenty minutes earlier: *Do not touch anything belonging to the mistress until I arrive. Chain of custody is everything in an alienation of affection or fault-based asset claim. Let the police handle it.*
Yet my hand hovered over the plastic bag.
Why had the anonymous photograph been sent to my personal email six nights ago? The sender had used an encrypted proton address: *truth_revealed_99*. At first, I had assumed it was Madison herself—a classic, spiteful move by a younger mistress tired of waiting for a married man to leave his wife. Mistresses often sent those breadcrumbs when they wanted to force a confrontation.
Suddenly, the screen lit up with a harsh vibration.
A text message banner flashed across the locked glass.
*Sender: Marcus (Legal Dept)*
*Text: Did Ethan get the flash drive from your apartment before the wreck? The SEC subpoena landed at 5 PM. If those offshore ledgers are in that bag, both of you are facing ten years for wire fraud.*
My breath caught in my throat. I stood frozen, my hand still poised above the bag.
Wire fraud? SEC subpoenas?
I grabbed the plastic bag, pulling the zip-tie open with a pen. I carefully manipulated the phone through the plastic seal. Another notification popped up immediately:
*Sender: Ethan Cunningham*
*Text: (Sent at 11:14 PM - 45 mins before the crash)*
*Text: Madison, pick up. If you give those documents to Lauren or the board, I swear to God you won't make it to Monday morning. Don't test me.*
The room seemed to tilt sideways. The walls of the call room closed in around me, the oxygen thinning to nothing.
This hadn't been an accident.
Ethan hadn't just been having a sordid, cliché office affair. Madison Vale wasn't just his lover; she was his co-conspirator, or perhaps his blackmailer. And forty-five minutes before their car careened off the edge of Skyline Drive, Ethan had threatened her life.
*If you give those documents to Lauren...*
She wasn't just trying to destroy my marriage. She had been trying to reach me. The anonymous email—the photograph of Ethan asleep in the hotel room, the deliberate framing of his cuff links and watch—hadn't been a gloating message from a mistress. It had been an SOS.
A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through my lower abdomen, radiating around to my lower back. I doubled over, gripping the edge of the steel desk, a low groan tearing from my lips. My uterine muscles clamped down into an iron fist, stone-hard under my fingers.
"No, no, no," I gasped, dropping onto the call-room cot. "Not now, Maya. Please, baby, not now. We’re only thirty-one weeks."
I forced myself to inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth, timing the contraction. Forty seconds. Fifty seconds. Finally, the muscle fibers released their violent grip, leaving me trembling and soaked in cold sweat. Braxton Hicks? Or was the sheer, astronomical stress of the night tipping my body into premature labor?
I grabbed my personal phone and dialed Rebecca Vance's private cell.
"Lauren?" Rebecca picked up on the second ring, her sharp, no-nonsense voice cutting through the fog in my head. "I’m in the parking garage. I’m walking up to the elevators now."
"Rebecca," I choked out, trying to steady my racing pulse. "Don't go to the trauma desk. Come straight to Call Room 3. And bring an evidence folder."
"What happened? Are you in labor?"
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"No," I whispered, staring down at Madison Vale’s cracked screen as another message appeared. "It’s not just divorce anymore, Rebecca. Ethan didn't just crash that car. He tried to kill her."
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