Chapter 3 - THE OTHER WOMAN
The words two million dollars should have felt unreal.
Instead, they fit too neatly beside everything else.
The wound.
The canceled rides.
The hidden bottle.
The insurance policy.
Tristan had not become cruel overnight.
Cruelty had simply stopped hiding.
Detective Bell cautioned me not to leap to conclusions before they finished examining the evidence.
I nodded because I understood procedure.
Inside, I was already replaying every strange moment from the previous year.
Tristan encouraging me to switch life insurance providers.
Tristan insisting he handle the forms.
Tristan joking that I was worth more dead than alive.
At the time, I had rolled my eyes.
Now the joke felt like a rehearsal.
The police found the beneficiary had not changed.
Tristan remained the sole beneficiary.
The increase had been authorized using an electronic signature that looked like mine.
I had no memory of signing it.
By noon, Bell had another discovery.
The storage unit contained printed flight itineraries to Vancouver under Tristan’s name and Celeste Ward’s name.
The tickets were not for the following week.
They were for that afternoon.
“He’s leaving today,” I said.
“Possibly.”
Bell’s answer was careful.
The warrant team had also found a small envelope of photographs.
Most showed Tristan with a woman in her late thirties with dark red hair and a polished, expensive appearance.
Celeste.
They were not casual coworkers.
They were holding hands in one photograph.
Kissing in another.
In a third, Tristan had his arm around her waist outside a waterfront restaurant.
The date stamp was from four months earlier.
I thought I would feel devastated.
Instead, I felt strangely relieved.
Infidelity was ordinary compared with what I feared now.
A mistress was painful.
A husband possibly engineering your death was something else entirely.
Then Bell showed me the fourth photograph.
Celeste stood beside Milo.
My son.
The picture had been taken outside his school.
Milo was smiling because he clearly believed she belonged there.
I stopped breathing.
“When was that?”
“Six weeks ago.”
I turned toward June.
She looked as shocked as I felt.
Milo had never mentioned meeting Celeste.
When I asked him gently, he said Dad had told him she was a new doctor helping with his treatment.
“She gave me hot chocolate.”
My stomach twisted.
“Did she ask you questions?”
He nodded.
“What kind?”
“If I liked Canada.”
Bell crouched beside him.
“Anything else?”
Milo thought hard.
“She asked if I would be sad if Mommy had to stay in a hospital for a long time.”
I had to grip the bedrail.
June swore under her breath.
Bell stood.
That question moved the case in a darker direction.
By afternoon, police had confirmed Tristan and Celeste had boarded a flight to Vancouver using tickets purchased weeks earlier.
There was no warrant yet strong enough to stop them at departure.
Investigators in Vancouver were notified.
I remained in the hospital for five more days.
During that time, the infection began to retreat.
The police found more records.
Tristan had searched my symptoms before I ever told him how bad I felt.
His work laptop history included questions about untreated cellulitis, sepsis timelines, and life-insurance contestability periods.
He had also searched how long someone with a high fever could remain coherent.
Bell did not tell me whether that was enough for an arrest.
He only said prosecutors were reviewing everything.
On my fifth night in the hospital, I received a message from an unknown number.
It contained a photograph.
The photographs of Celeste did not make me hate her immediately.
I hated that.
Part of me wanted a clean villain beside Tristan.
A woman who knew everything and laughed while helping him hurt me.
That would have been easier.
Instead, the pictures showed ordinary affection.
Celeste leaning against him on a ferry.
Celeste laughing in a restaurant.
Tristan touching the small of her back the way he used to touch mine when we crossed a crowded room.
I recognized the choreography.
That recognition turned jealousy into something stranger.
I was looking at an earlier version of myself.
A woman receiving attention from a man who had not yet made the price visible.
Bell asked whether I wanted to contact her before police did.
I said no.
Then I changed my mind.
Not because I wanted confrontation.
Because of the photograph with Milo.
No affair explained bringing a stranger near my child under a false medical identity.
That crossed into planning.
Bell contacted Celeste through official channels instead.
She initially refused to speak.
According to the report, she said Tristan had warned her I would fabricate criminal allegations once I learned he planned to divorce me.
He had prepared her for the truth by describing it as a lie in advance.
That technique appeared again and again.
He told his mother I might accuse him of financial control.
He told coworkers I was becoming suspicious and emotional.
He told Celeste I would call her a mistress.
He told Victor, according to later messages, that I might “manufacture abuse.”
By predicting the accusation, he tried to immunize people against it.
The more accurate I sounded, the more he could say, See, I warned you.
Bell called it pre-bunking.
I called it stealing my voice before I used it.
The online smear campaign grew quickly.
A former coworker messaged me asking whether I was safe from myself.
Another friend said Tristan told her I had attacked him during a fever.
His cousin posted a vague quote about men suffering in silence.
Nobody named me publicly, but everyone knew.
June wanted me to respond online.
Maya, who had just joined the case, advised against it.
“Social media rewards speed,” she said.
“Courts reward records.”
So we built records.
I downloaded every message.
I saved screenshots.
I wrote dates beside memories while they were fresh.
I requested copies of bank statements going back three years.
I asked my employer for security logs showing when Tristan had entered the building to “surprise me” at work.
There were fourteen visits.
I remembered perhaps five.
On several occasions, he entered the lobby, waited, and left without telling me he had been there.
It looked less like romance in a security spreadsheet.
Milo’s comment about the lady from Dad’s phone created another problem.
He had been carrying adult secrets without understanding them.
I asked a child therapist how to question him without turning him into a witness for me.
She told me not to interrogate.
Children fill silence when adults need answers, and those answers can become distorted by pressure.
Instead, we let trained interviewers speak with him once.
I stayed out of the room.
That was difficult.
I wanted every detail.
I also wanted my son to remain my son rather than a source of evidence.
The interviewer learned that Celeste had met Milo three times.
Each time, Tristan called her Doctor Celeste.
She never corrected him.
Whether she knew Milo believed she was a physician remained unclear.
She asked about Canada twice.
She also asked which toys he would take if he had to stay somewhere else for a while.
That answer made investigators look harder at travel plans.
Later we learned Tristan had discussed moving with her after my death.
At that stage, all we had was a seven-year-old remembering hot chocolate and questions.
It was enough to make me afraid.
Not enough to make me certain.
Living inside that difference became the rhythm of the investigation.
Fear arrived first.
Proof walked slower.
The first time I saw Tristan’s public post describing himself as a husband enduring false accusations, I nearly answered.
My response filled three angry paragraphs.
I typed every fact he omitted.
Then I sent the draft to Maya instead of posting it.
She called five minutes later.
“Excellent private letter.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it should remain private.”
I deleted it.
That decision felt like surrender for an hour.
Then something unexpected happened.
Tristan posted again.
And again.
Without my response, his messages became more extreme because he had no argument to react against.
Friends began noticing inconsistencies on their own.
Silence did not always mean losing the narrative.
Sometimes it removed the surface another person needed to keep performing against.
Tristan and Celeste were sitting beside a hotel pool in Vancouver.
Both looked relaxed.
The message underneath read:
You should have stayed in bed.
I showed it to Bell.
He forwarded it to cybercrime investigators.
The number vanished minutes later.
The next morning, I was discharged to June’s house under a temporary protection order.
I expected Tristan to disappear.
Instead, he began performing innocence online.
He posted photographs from Vancouver with captions about surviving a difficult family situation.
He told friends I had suffered a medical episode and become paranoid.
He told his mother I had accused him of poisoning me because I was jealous of a female colleague.
The female colleague was Celeste.
Within forty-eight hours, mutual friends were calling to ask whether I needed psychiatric help.
Tristan understood something I had not yet understood.
He could not control the police investigation.
But he could try to control everyone around it.
Then he made his biggest mistake.
He called Milo.
The call came through a school tablet he had once helped configure.
June found Milo crying in the guest room.
I took the tablet.
Tristan’s face filled the screen.
He looked rested.
Almost cheerful.
“Give the phone back to my son.”
“No.”
His expression hardened.
“You’re poisoning him against me.”
I nearly laughed at the choice of words.
Then Celeste stepped into view behind him wearing a hotel robe.
For the first time, she and I looked directly at each other.
She froze.
Tristan turned.
Something passed between them.
Not affection.
Fear.
Celeste moved closer to the camera.
“Reese?”
Tristan grabbed the tablet.
May you like
But before the screen went black, Celeste shouted one sentence.
“Ask him what happened to his first wife.”
