Chapter 14 - THE PACKAGE AT THE GATEThe package arrived at 6:40 the next morning.
No return address.
Plain brown paper.
Left outside the guest house gate.
Security found it during the first patrol and called police before touching it.
Detective Harris arrived personally.
Irene watched from the window, pale and silent.
Inside the package was a flash drive and a baby blanket.
The blanket was white.
New.
Folded perfectly.
Pinned to it was a note.
For the child, before Irene poisons it against us.
Irene ran to the bathroom and threw up.
I stood in the hallway shaking with a rage so intense it felt clean.
Harris bagged the note.
“We’ll test it.”
“It’s her.”
“Likely.”
“No. It’s her.”
The flash drive contained videos.
Not threats.
Worse.
Videos of Irene inside our home.
In the kitchen.
In the garden.
Walking from the shower to the closet wrapped in a robe.
Sleeping.
I stopped the playback and turned away.
Carla had placed cameras in my house.
Maybe under Margaret’s direction.
Maybe laughing while doing it.
My wife had been watched in the only place she should have been safe.
Harris’s face hardened.
“This adds surveillance charges.”
I laughed once.
A terrible sound.
“Add it to the pile.”
Irene stood in the doorway behind us.
“How long?” she asked.
No one answered.
She walked to the laptop and looked at the file dates.
The earliest was two months old.
She sat down slowly.
“I kept feeling watched,” she whispered. “She told me pregnancy made women paranoid.”
I knelt in front of her.
“I’m sorry.”
Irene looked at me, and for the first time, I saw anger break through the fear.
Not at me.
Not entirely.
At all of it.
At being doubted.
At being hunted.
At being told terror was imagination.
“She is never touching my baby,” Irene said.
There was steel in her voice.
I nodded.
“No.”
“I don’t want to hide forever.”
“You won’t.”
“I want to testify.”
The room went quiet.
Harris studied her.
“You don’t have to decide now.”
“I know.”
Her hand moved to her stomach.
“But Margaret has spent months speaking for me. I want a room where she has to hear my voice.”
May you like
I had never loved her more.
Nor feared more for what that voice would cost her.
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