Mark stepped forward from behind the officers. His face was grey with fury and grief.
“James Wilson gave us a recording device,” he said, his voice shaking. “We’ve heard everything you said, Emma. Everything.”
Every cruel word was there, preserved in digital clarity. Emma ordering my death. Emma laughing about her fake kidney disease. Emma mocking Mark’s blind devotion.
James, the criminal who had killed me, smirked from between two officers. He pointed to
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Emma’s designer handbag, discarded in the corner.
“Want to know why I left evidence?” He laughed bitterly, “Because I wanted him to know horn
to help me escape his precious Emma orchestrated his wife’s murder. How she prison if I made it look like a crime of passion.”
Emma’s face turned ashen as she collapsed back into her hospital bed. Her expensive makeup couldn’t hide her terror now.
Mark grabbed her shoulders, his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. “I trusted you! I believed every word you said!”
His voice cracked with fury and despair. “I chose you over my own wife! I believed every lie you told about her!”
He released her with a shove, running his hands through his graying hair.
“You even faked kidney failure to force her into surgery. You knew she was pregnant, didn’t you? YOU KNEW!”
Looking at Emma’s unrepentant face, something in Mark finally broke.
Emma’s defeated eyes suddenly flashed with jealousy and hatred. Her mask slipped completely, revealing the monster beneath.
“I was with you first!” she screamed, all pretense of refinement gone. “When you were nothing but a rookie cop living in a cramped apartment, eating ramen noodles!”
She laughed hysterically, tears streaking her mascara.
“Then you
become the city’s best detective, this big shot with a fancy house, and who do you marry? Her! That nothing, that nobody!”
Sarah stepped forward, her voice cutting like ice. “You abandoned Mark first, Emma. Or have you conveniently forgotten?”
Her words silenced Emma’s hysteria.
“Remember? You said he had no futuré. That he wasn’t good enough for you. That you deserved better than a beat cop’s salary.”
“Now you couldn’t stand seeing him happy with someone else. You’re pathetic.”
Emma was led away in handcuffs, still wearing her patient gown. The nurses who had pitied her now turned away in disgust.
The day Emma was sentenced to life in prison, Mark placed white lilies on my grave. My favorite flowers – something Emma hadn’t known.
In prison, the other inmates despised Emma when they learned how she’d orchestrated her rival’s death, killed a pregnant woman.
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They made her life hell, a fitting punishment for her crimes.
“How does it feel?” they would taunt as they passed her cell. “Killing a mother and her baby? Not so proud now, are you?”
Meanwhile, Mark sat in our empty house, staring at my ultrasound photo. The last image of our child.
“Alice…” he would murmur, setting out pills for a wife who wasn’t there. “Drink your medicine… the baby needs you to stay healthy…”
His mind had fractured under the weight of guilt and grief. The brilliant detective was gone, replaced by a hollow shell.
He could no longer handle cases. The knowledge that his blind devotion to Emma had led to his wife’s death broke something fundamental in him.
Mark would sit for hours in our kitchen, talking to my empty chair.
“I’m sorry,” he would whisper. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you.”
Sarah visited sometimes, watching her childhood friend’s descent into madness. She would bring food he wouldn’t eat, clean rooms he didn’t see.
Finally, she sighed heavily as she packed her bags to leave the city. She couldn’t bear to watch
anymore.
“I can’t do this,” she told her husband as they drove away. “Mark chose this path when he believed Emma over Alice. Now he has to live with it.”
Looking at Mark’s prematurely grey hair and vacant eyes, my heart ached with an endless winter of grief.
I wanted to tell him I forgave him. That I understood how Emma’s manipulation had poisoned everything.
But I was only a ghost, watching helplessly as my husband drowned in regret.
Mark…
If there’s another life after this one, I hope you learn to see the truth before it’s too late. I hope you learn to trust love over lies.
My spirit began to fade then, the world growing dim around me. Perhaps this was truly the end.
In my final moments, I thought I heard Mark’s voice, gentle as it had been in our early days of marriage: “Alice, come home for dinner. I made your favorite soup.”
Sarah’s warm touch on my hand, her smile kind and understanding: “You can rest now, Alice. It’s over. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
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But it was just a dream, fading like everything else into the darkness.
Just like my life had faded, lost to Emma’s jealousy and Mark’s blindness.
In the end, there was only silence, and the hope that somewhere, somehow, love might win over lies.
