Chapter 5 - The Woman on the List
I was still trying to understand Emily's words when her monitor sounded a warning, and a nurse came quickly to check her blood pressure.
The reading stabilized after treatment, but it reminded me how fragile she remained.
Whatever secret she held, her body could not afford an interrogation.
I told her to rest.
"You don't understand," she whispered.
"Then tell me when you're ready."
She swallowed, her eyes closing.
"Marian Vale."
The name meant nothing to me.
I wrote it on a scrap of paper and stayed beside her until she slept.
When I mentioned it to Detective Collins, her expression changed in a way she tried to conceal.
"How did Emily hear that name?"
"She says she sent records to someone Michael thinks is dead."
Collins asked permission to call a colleague.
Ten minutes later, she returned with information that made my mouth go dry.
Marian Vale had been a quality-control auditor at Michael's company four years earlier.
She had reported discrepancies in patient-service logs and vanished from local employment records after a widely publicized car accident.
People assumed she'd died because a newspaper correction had never been widely circulated.
In fact, she had survived, moved away, and kept her new address private.
"We don't know whether that's the person Emily contacted," Collins warned.
But I remembered a name Michael sometimes said with contempt.
Vale.
He called her reckless, dishonest, the sort of woman who ruined good people because she couldn't get promoted.
Once he'd said she was lucky to be alive after what she'd done.
I'd assumed he meant professionally.
Now I wasn't so sure.
Allison advised me not to contact Marian directly until we understood whether it could expose her or Emily to additional risks.
That evening, a hospital volunteer brought a brown paper bag of toiletries from an organization that helped families in crisis.
Inside were socks, toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a note in neat handwriting.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO BACK.
I read the sentence three times.
Then my sister Rachel called.
We hadn't spoken in four months.
Michael had convinced me she was interfering in our marriage, and I'd stopped answering her messages to avoid another argument at home.
Now her voice broke when she heard mine.
"Sarah, why didn't you call me?"
"I thought you were angry."
"I was worried. There's a difference."
I told her about Emily.
She didn't demand explanations or tell me what I should have done sooner.
She asked what we needed.
"A place to go," I said.
"You have one."
Rachel lived thirty miles away in a small house with an extra bedroom and a dog that shed everywhere.
It sounded like paradise.
Then she added, "And Sarah, there's something you should know about Michael."
My stomach tightened.
"What?"
"He came to my office last week. He wanted me to sign a statement about your mental health."
For a moment the hospital room seemed to tilt.
"What did you say?"
"I told him to leave."
Rachel's breath caught.
"He said it didn't matter. He already had enough people."
I looked down at the custody filing beside me.
Michael hadn't improvised his accusations after the emergency-room confrontation.
May you like
He had been preparing them before Emily ever collapsed.
