Chapter 5: The Empty House
1386 Words
Richard's POV:
The car pulled away from the curb before I could reach the gate. I stood there with my phone still in my hand and Sylvia's voice still ringing in my ear, watching the black sedan disappear down the street with Evelyn inside it.
"Richard? Richard, are you listening to me?" My mother's voice was sharp through the speaker. "Justina said there was a pregnancy test in the bedroom drawer. Did you know about this?"
I did not answer right away. My mind was stuck on something else, on the look Evelyn had given me just before that man stepped between us. It was not anger, and it was not sadness. It was the look of someone who had already said goodbye a long time ago and was only now walking away.
"Richard!"
"I heard you, Mother. I will handle it."
"Handle it? That girl could be carrying a Williams heir, and you let her walk out the front door with a stranger? Who was that man?"
"I do not know."
"You do not know.. wow! I should applaud you." Mum hung up, and the silence that followed was louder than her voice had ever been.
I walked back into the house. The dining room still smelled like the salmon Evelyn had cooked the night before. The candles on the table had melted into flat white puddles, and two plates sat across from each other, one untouched, the food cold and stiff.
She had set the table for us. Two candles, the good plates, fresh flowers in a small vase at the center. This was not a routine dinner. She had been planning something.
I picked up the plate she had prepared for me. The salmon was cooked exactly the way I liked it, with a thin crust of herbs on top and lemon slices on the side. She had remembered. After three years of me never once telling her that I noticed, she had still remembered.
Tonia walked into the dining room. "Is everything okay? I heard yelling."
"Did you go through Evelyn's things?"
She blinked. "What?"
"The pregnancy test. It was in the bedside drawer. Evelyn did not leave it out in the open. Someone opened that drawer and put it on the bed. Was it you?"
Tonia crossed her arms. "I do not know what you are talking about."
"Tonia."
"Fine, yes, I looked in the drawer. I was curious. Is that a crime?" She tossed her hair over one shoulder. "And honestly, Richard, you should be thanking me. If she really is pregnant, you need to know about it before the annulment goes through. Do you want to be paying child support for the next eighteen years?"
I set the plate down. "What happened between you and Evelyn in the bedroom earlier? The real version."
"I already told you. She attacked me for no reason."
"Justina said Evelyn pushed you. But Evelyn said you grabbed her first."
"And you believe her over me?"
I looked at Tonia for a long moment. She was beautiful, confident, and sharp. She came from a wealthy family, she played the piano like an angel, and she had been the woman I pictured when I imagined my future. Before the accident, before the coma, before I woke up married to a stranger.
But right now, standing in the dining room that Evelyn had decorated with care, next to the dinner she had cooked with love, all I could see was a woman who had searched through my wife's private belongings and lied about it.
"I need to make a phone call," I said, and I walked past her without another word.
In my study, I pulled up the security camera footage on my laptop. I had cameras installed in every hallway, though not inside the bedrooms. The timestamp showed 8:47 a.m. Tonia walked into the master bedroom. At 8:52, she came back out, and she was holding something small and rectangular in her hand.
At 8:53, she walked back in without it.
She had taken the test out of the drawer, looked at it, and then placed it on the bed for Evelyn to find. She wanted Evelyn to panic. She wanted a reaction.
And she got one.
I closed the laptop and sat back in my chair. My study was exactly the way it always was: organized, quiet, controlled. Everything in my life was supposed to be controlled. That was how I ran my company, my schedule, my relationships. No surprises, no mess, no feelings that could not be filed away into neat categories.
Then Evelyn had walked into my life, or rather, I had woken up to find her already there, and nothing had been neat since.
I remembered the first time I saw her after the coma. She was sitting in a plastic chair beside my hospital bed, fast asleep, with her head resting on the mattress near my hand. Her hair was tangled, and she had dark circles under her eyes, and there was a half-eaten sandwich on the tray beside her. The nurse told me she had not left my side in three weeks.
I did not know who she was. I did not know her name, her face, or the sound of her voice. But she was my wife, and she had stayed when everyone else had left.
That should have meant something.
It did mean something, but I had spent three years pretending it did not.
My phone rang. It was my grandmother, Elizabeth.
"Richard, what have you done?" Elizabeth's voice was thin but fierce, the way it always was when she was angry.
"Grandmother, I can explain..."
"You gave that girl annulment papers? After everything she did for this family? After she sat by your bed for three weeks and prayed you back to life?"
"Our marriage was not real, Grandmother. She married me as a favor to you."
"And you repaid that favor by putting another woman in her home? Tonia Sinclair, of all people? The girl who ran away the moment she heard you were in a coma?"
I closed my eyes. "It is more complicated than that."
"It is not complicated at all, Richard. You are a fool. A proud, stubborn, blind fool." Elizabeth's breathing was heavy, and I could hear her nurse murmuring in the background. "Now tell me the truth. Is Evelyn carrying your child?"
"I do not know. She asked me last night what I would do if she were pregnant, and I told her..."
"You told her what?"
I could not say it. The words I had spoken last night sounded different now, heavier, uglier, like stones I had thrown without looking where they would land.
"You told her you did not want the baby," Grandma said, and it was not a question. "Didn't you?"
"Find her, Richard… Find her and fix this. If anything happens to that girl or that baby, I will never forgive you. And I am not talking about the kind of forgiveness that heals with time. I mean the kind that dies with me."
She hung up. The line went dead, and I sat in the dark study surrounded by bookshelves and filing cabinets and the cold, clean order of a life I had built to keep people out.
I opened my phone and scrolled to Evelyn's contact. Her name sat in my phone exactly the way I had typed it three years ago: "Evelyn (wife)."
I pressed the call.
It rang once, twice, three times, four times.
Then a man's voice answered, deep and calm and unfamiliar.
"Evelyn is not available right now. Who is this?"
"This is her husband. Who the hell are you?"
A pause. Then the man spoke again, and his voice was so steady it made my skin crawl.
"Her husband? That is interesting, because from what I understand, you stopped being her husband the moment you signed those papers." Another pause. "My name is Benjamin Valentine. I am Evelyn's brother. And if you are calling to cause her more pain, I suggest you hang up now, because there are six of us, and we do not take kindly to men who make our sister cry."
The line went dead, I stared at the phone in my hand.
Six of them?
- Writer
