That night, while Mia slept in her hospital bed and Clara dozed in the chair beside her, I searched Rachel’s name on my phone.
She had died three years earlier. She was thirty-eight.
The short obituary said she’d passed away at home. A local news report listed the cause as an accidental reaction to her medication. The case had been closed, with nothing unusual noted.
I sat in that dim hospital room staring at the screen for a long time.
A woman who once stood up to Gregory Hale had died of something in her system. And now my daughter was lying three feet away from me for the same reason.
Two days later, my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.
“My name is Laura,” a woman said, her voice shaking. “I’m Gregory Hale’s ex-wife. I heard about your daughter. I need to talk to you before he finds out I called.”
Laura had known Rachel in college, too. She had even spoken at Gregory’s hearing. Years later, she ran into him again. He seemed calm, successful, and changed. She believed him. They married and had Owen.
It didn’t last. The control came back slowly, she said: who she could see, where she could go, what she was allowed to say.
“When I filed for divorce, I found notebooks in his study,” she told me. “Pages and pages about plants, what they do to people, how much it takes. I took them to the police, but he said it was research for a consulting job. There was nothing they could prove. I got custody of Owen, but the judge still gave Gregory weekends.”
She paused.
“He never forgot you. Whenever he got angry, your name came up. He used to say that one day he’d take away the thing you loved most.”
I gave Laura the detectives’ number. She called them that same afternoon.
