Chapter 2

The house was too quiet. Every corner held an echo of Lily' s laughter, a ghost of her small footsteps. I spent the day after her death in a fog, moving through rooms that felt alien and vast.

I found myself in her bedroom, standing before her small wooden toy box. I knelt and lifted the lid. Inside, her stuffed animals were piled together. A worn-out teddy bear with one button eye, a floppy-eared bunny, a small, colorful unicorn. I picked up the bear, its fur matted from countless hugs, and pressed it to my face. It still smelled faintly of her, a mix of baby shampoo and sweet cookies.

The grief was a constant, heavy pressure in my chest, making it hard to breathe. I wasn't just mourning her loss, I was reliving her last moments. The terror in her eyes, the sound of the door clicking shut, the suffocating silence that followed. It played on a loop in my mind.

I turned on the television for a distraction, but it only made things worse. The news channels were full of Ethan and Chloe. Pictures of them at the gala were everywhere. They were smiling, their heads close together, looking every bit the power couple.

One headline read: "A Spiritual Reunion: Tech Visionary Ethan Hayes and Mentor Chloe Davis Rekindle a Powerful Connection."

The article beneath it was filled with praise for Ethan' s devotion to his "spiritual path." It painted Chloe as a wise, benevolent figure. They talked about their shared future, their plans to expand their wellness empire.

There was no mention of his wife. No mention of his daughter. We were erased.

The public saw a charismatic genius and his enlightened partner. I saw the man who had locked our child in a dark room until her heart gave out. I saw the woman he did it for. The contrast between the public image and the private reality was a sickening twist in my gut.

I began to look back at my five years of marriage, seeing everything through this new, horrifying lens. I had always known Ethan was detached. He treated emotions as messy, inconvenient data points that disrupted his perfectly ordered world. His "spiritual journey" wasn't about connection, it was about control. He meditated not to find peace, but to wall himself off from the untidiness of human feeling.

I had made excuses for him. He' s a genius, his mind works differently. He' s under a lot of pressure. He just doesn't know how to show he cares.

But now I saw it for what it was: a profound lack of empathy. A coldness so deep it was monstrous. He didn' t just neglect his family; he saw us as obstacles to his immaculate public image. Lily' s anxiety, my "coddling" -they were flaws in his perfect narrative.

The doorbell rang, startling me. I opened it to find Ethan' s mother, Mrs. Hayes, standing on the porch. She was a stern, elegant woman who rarely showed emotion, but today, her face was etched with concern.

"Sarah," she said, her voice softer than usual. "I heard about... the accident. With the crystals. Ethan called me. He' s worried about you."

She stepped inside, her eyes scanning the silent house. "He said you were hysterical."

I just stared at her, the word "hysterical" bouncing around in my empty mind.

"He' s a fool, Sarah. A brilliant fool, but a fool nonetheless," she said, sitting down on the sofa. She opened her purse and took out a checkbook. "I know he can be... difficult. He gets lost in his own world. I want to make things right."

She wrote out a check and slid it across the coffee table. I glanced down at it. It was for a staggering amount of money, more than I could ever spend.

"Take this," she said. "Go on a trip. Buy yourself something beautiful. I know this doesn't fix anything, but... I am sorry for his carelessness."

Carelessness. The word was so small, so inadequate for the enormity of what had happened. He wasn' t careless. He was cruel.

I looked from the check to her face. I saw a flicker of genuine sympathy in her eyes, but it was buried under a lifetime of enabling her son' s behavior. She was trying to smooth things over, to manage a difficult situation with money, the way the Hayes family always did.

I pushed the check back toward her.

"I don' t want your money, Mrs. Hayes."

She looked surprised. "Sarah, don' t be proud. You deserve it."

"It' s not about pride," I said, my voice shaking slightly. "It' s not something money can fix. I am divorcing him."

Her carefully composed expression faltered. "Divorce? Sarah, think about this. A scandal would be devastating for the company, for the family name."

"The family name?" I repeated, a bitter laugh escaping my lips. "Your son killed my daughter. What is a family name compared to that?"

I hadn't meant to say it. The words just came out, raw and unfiltered.

Mrs. Hayes' s face went pale. "What did you say?"

I couldn' t stop myself. The dam of my composure broke. "He locked her in the meditation room. As a punishment. For breaking his crystals. She died in there. Alone. Terrified."

The truth hung in the air between us, heavy and poisonous.

Mrs. Hayes stared at me, her eyes wide with a dawning horror. She seemed to speechless, unable to process the information.

I couldn' t bear to look at her. I couldn' t bear to be in that house another second.

I stood up and walked back to Lily' s room. I closed the door behind me and slid down to the floor.

I pulled her little unicorn into my lap and finally, completely, fell apart. The pain was no longer a dull ache. It was a storm, a hurricane of agony that ripped through me, leaving nothing but wreckage behind. I sobbed until my throat was raw and my body ached, surrounded by the ghosts of a life that had been stolen from me.