One Sentence Made My Ex Kill the Groom

Chapter 2

The interrogation room at the Belmont Police Department had no windows.

Detective Daniel Mason sat across from me. He paused the wedding footage on the frame where I approached Audrey and tapped the table with one finger.

"What did you say to her?"

"A blessing."

"What kind of blessing makes a bride murder her husband three seconds later?"

"If I had that kind of power, I wouldn't be the one sitting here."

Daniel slid a photograph of Nathan toward me. Stab wounds covered his chest and abdomen. The final thrust had pierced his heart.

"He was 32 years old, legal counsel for the Whitmore Foundation, and had no criminal record. The night before the wedding, he wrote Audrey a letter promising to love and protect her for the rest of his life."

I lowered my gaze to the photograph.

"How touching."

"Did you know him?"

"I met him twice."

"Did you hate him?"

"Why would I hate a stranger?"

Daniel studied me for a long time, then asked abruptly, "What exactly was your relationship with Audrey?"

"We went to high school together."

"Everyone says you dated."

"Everyone also said she was happy." I looked up. "Detective, rumors can lie right down to the punctuation."

In the room next door, Audrey remained silent.

She offered no explanation or defense, nor would she say what I had whispered. A psychiatrist believed she was suffering from a severe mental disorder. The prosecution could find no evidence that she and Nathan had argued, much less that I had urged her to kill him.

The case became a national sensation.

News stations played the footage of me leaning in to whisper on an endless loop. Some people claimed I could hypnotize others. Some said I had planted a sinister suggestion in Audrey's mind. Someone even offered $100,000 for those five words.

Overnight, I became the most famous woman in Belmont.

The clinic canceled my appointments, and my landlord told me to move out. Strangers gathered outside my building every day, shouting "Murderer!" or "Say it again!" One streamer even hired a woman to dress up as Audrey and wave a plastic knife outside my door during a livestream.

Most absurd of all were the people who came to beg me for help.

A mother who had lost her son knelt outside the clinic, clutching his photograph as she begged me to say those words to the driver who had killed him.

An elderly man dying of cancer sent me his life savings, convinced I could make his unfaithful wife pay for what she'd done.

They believed those five words would somehow give their anger a purpose. As if saying them would finally make all that pain mean something.

I returned every penny without saying why.

Because I knew better than anyone: the most dangerous thing in the world was never the words themselves. It was everything a person had endured in silence before someone finally gave those words a voice.

Vivian and her husband, Theodore Whitmore, were waiting outside the police station.

The moment I emerged, Vivian slapped me across the face.

"You destroyed her!"

Theodore clamped his hand around my shoulder.

"It took us 26 years to make Audrey the woman she is today. Why did you always have to teach her to defy us? Why couldn't you stay away from our daughter?"

Reporters thrust their microphones toward me at once.

"Miss Reed, do you admit that you once encouraged Audrey to rebel against her parents?"

"Did you ruin the wedding because you couldn't have her?"

I wiped the blood from the corner of my mouth and answered only one question.

"No. I never had her."

No one in this world had ever truly had Audrey.

Not even Audrey herself.