Ethan sat alone in the cavernous living room, and the sickly yellow light draped over his stubble-shadowed face. The suffocating silence pressed in on him, ready to devour him alive.
He obsessively rewound the video, and each frame sliced through his arrogant assumptions like a scalpel.
She never planned to die. She only wanted Aria dead.
With a violent stab, he paused the playback and froze on Iris's theatrical pour of fake blood. "How could this be?" he muttered. "None of it was real. She played me."
The child was not his. That suicide note was pure fiction, her twisted masterpiece. The allergies and the threats were all part of her elaborate charade. Aria had never laid a finger on the child.
Outside, rain lashed against the windows like a furious beast.
He sprinted to Eastwood Ma
