MY HUSBAND LOVE ME TOO LATE

CHAPTER TEN The Phone Never Lies

Emma's POV

I made it as far as the top of the stairs before someone called my name.

"Mrs. Ashford."

I turned. The officer with the notepad stood in the guest wing doorway, Claire's phone still in his hand. His face had changed. The wariness was gone. Something sharper had taken its place.

"You'll want to see this," he said.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I walked back down the hallway, my bare feet cold against the marble, past a maid frozen in the doorway of the linen closet, past Henry, past Lucas standing rigid near the bed, past Sophia still curled against the pillows with her tears drying on her cheeks like she'd already forgotten to keep them fresh.

Nobody spoke while I crossed the room. The only sound was my own heartbeat, loud in my ears, and the faint hum of the officer's radio clipped to his shoulder.

The officer turned the phone toward me.

A text thread. Claire and a saved contact.

Not "Dad."

Not "Victor."

Sophy

My mouth went dry.

The message on top, sent at 6:01 that morning, four minutes after I'd walked into the study, read simple and short.

She's in the study. Alone. Tell your father now.

The next one, sent thirty seconds later from Claire back to that same contact, said only:

Done. He's already moving.

I stopped breathing.

"That's not—" Claire's voice cracked from the corner of the room. "That doesn't mean anything. She's family. We talk—"

"You talk about my daughter's school schedule?" Lucas's voice came out low. Too low. "At six in the morning?"

"People text early. It doesn't prove anything."

"It proves you knew Emma was in that study," Henry said quietly, speaking for the first time since we'd walked in. "And it proves you told someone within seconds."

Claire's eyes darted to Sophia, looking for help, for a script, for anything. Sophia didn't look back at her.

Sophia sat up straighter on the bed. The tears were still there, but something underneath them had gone still and cold, like water freezing over.

"Claire panicked," she said quickly. "I told her to call security, not—"

"It says tell your father." Lucas hadn't moved. His eyes hadn't left the screen. "Not call security. Tell your father."

"Lucas, you're twisting my words—"

"I'm reading your words." He looked up at her for the first time since the reading of that message, and whatever had been holding him back before was gone now. "You told my sister to warn my father that Emma was alone in my study. Four minutes later, a man showed up at my daughter's school."

"That's insane. I would never put Lily in danger. You know how much I love that little girl—"

"Do I?" Lucas's jaw tightened. "Because right now I don't know anything anymore."

The officer cleared his throat. "Ma'am, given what we've just found, I'm going to need to see your phone as well."

Sophia's face didn't crack. Not right away. For one long second she just sat there, perfectly still, and I watched the mask try to decide what to do next.

Then she laughed. Soft. Disbelieving. The kind of laugh people use when they're stalling.

"My phone," she repeated. "You want my phone."

"Yes, ma'am."

"This is absurd." She looked at Lucas, waiting for him to step in the way he always did. "Lucas. Tell them this is absurd."

He didn't say a word.

That silence broke something in her face I'd never seen before. Not tears. Not the trembling lip. Just a flash of pure panic, gone almost as fast as it came, but I saw it. Henry saw it too. I felt him go still beside me.

"Fine." Sophia's hand shook as she reached for her bag on the nightstand. "Fine, look at it. There's nothing on it."

She pulled out the phone and held it toward the officer. Her thumb hovered over the screen for half a second too long.

"Ma'am, please unlock it."

"I am." Her voice had gone thin. "Give me a second, my hands are—"

The screen lit up. Home screen. Normal. Ordinary.

Then the officer swiped once, into her messages, and stopped.

His whole face changed.

"Whose number is this," he said slowly, turning the screen so Lucas could see it. "Saved as 'Flowershop.'"

Lucas leaned in. I watched the color drain out of his face, all of it, at once, like someone had pulled a plug.

"That's not a flower shop," he said. His voice had gone somewhere far away. "That's my father's private line. The one only three people in this world have."

The room seemed to shrink. Even Claire had gone quiet, her earlier defiance draining out of her as fast as the color out of her brother's face.

"You had my father saved under a fake name," Lucas said again, slower this time, like he needed to hear himself say it to believe it. "A flower shop, Sophia. Really."

Sophia's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"Sophia." Lucas said her name like it hurt to say. "How long have you had my father's private number saved under a fake name in your phone?"

"Lucas, I can explain—"

"How long?"

The silence stretched so long I thought she wasn't going to answer at all. The officer waited, pen hovering over his notepad. Henry's grip on my arm tightened without either of us noticing.

Then, quietly, almost too quiet to hear, she said, "Since before I came back."

The room went completely still.

"Before you came back," Lucas repeated. "You mean before you ever showed up at that airport. Before I ever picked you up. Before any of it."

Sophia's eyes filled again, but this time nobody in the room believed the tears. Not even Lucas.

"It's not what you think," she whispered.

"Then tell me what it is," Lucas said. "Because right now it looks like my father brought you back into this house. Not fate. Not old love. My father."

She didn't answer. She just sat there on the edge of that bed, phone shaking in her hand, and for the first time since she'd walked back into our lives, Sophia Bennett had absolutely nothing to say.

The officer reached for the phone. "Ma'am, I'm going to need to take this into evidence."

That's when the lights went out.

All of them. The whole guest wing, plunged into black at once, no flicker, no warning, just darkness so total I couldn't see my own hand in front of me. Someone gasped. Claire screamed. Sophia's phone clattered to the floor.

"Nobody move," the officer barked. "Nobody touch anything."

I heard footsteps scrambling somewhere near the window. A chair scraped against the floor. Somewhere in the dark, Sophia was breathing fast, quick little gasps that didn't sound like fear anymore. They sounded like calculation.

"Stay where you are," the second officer said, his voice tight. "All of you."

A radio crackled somewhere in the dark. A voice, panicked, breaking through the static.

"We've got a problem downstairs. The security gate just opened. Somebody's coming up the drive."

"That's not possible," Lucas said, his voice cutting through the black. "Nobody has clearance tonight. I locked the system myself an hour ago."

"Sir, I'm looking at the feed right now. The gate's wide open. Whoever it is, they used a master code."

Henry's hand found my arm in the darkness, gripping hard.

"Emma," he said, and I could hear the fear in his voice this time, real fear, nothing steady about it at all. "That gate only opens for family."

Somewhere below us, headlights swept across the ceiling through the hallway window, long white beams crawling over the walls before vanishing again.

A car door slammed.

Then another.

"How many cars," Lucas said, and this time his voice had lost every trace of the calm control I'd relied on all morning.

The radio crackled once more, and the guard's voice came through broken and fast.

"Three, sir. Three cars. And Mr. Ashford — your father's in the first one."

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. In the darkness I could hear everyone's breathing, ragged and uneven, the whole room holding its breath at once.

"Get the lights back on," Lucas said. His voice had gone hard again, but underneath it I could hear something new. Something that almost sounded like fear. "Now."

"Working on it, sir. Someone cut the main breaker manually. It wasn't an outage."

Manually. Someone inside this house had done this on purpose, timed to the exact minute Victor's phone had shown up in Sophia's contacts. Timed to give him cover to walk in unseen.

I felt Henry go rigid beside me.

"He knows," Henry whispered, so quiet only I could hear it. "He knows we found the phone."

Downstairs, the front door opened. I heard it even through two floors and a hallway, that heavy, deliberate sound, the same sound I'd grown to dread every time Victor Ashford walked into a room like he already owned everyone in it.

Footsteps. Slow. Unhurried. Climbing the stairs like he had all the time in the world.

"Lucas," I whispered into the dark. "What if

he already knows what's on that phone?"

Nobody answered me.

The footsteps kept climbing.