Chapter 7 - HE SAW THEM
The room seemed to shrink.
“What did you say?”
Julianne looked at the floor.
“He saw the calls.”
I heard my own heartbeat.
“David told me his phone was turned off.”
“It wasn’t.”
“When?”
“The first night on the yacht.”
My voice became dangerously quiet.
“All fifty?”
“Not at first.”
She wiped tears from her face.
“You called repeatedly during dinner.”
I remembered every one.
Call nineteen.
Call twenty.
Call twenty-one.
Lily had been sleeping between them.
Call twenty-two happened after the doctor told me her heart was failing.
Julianne continued.
“David kept turning the phone face down.”
“Did you ask why?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That you did this whenever he traveled.”
I felt sick.
“Then what?”
“Later that night, he looked at the screen.”
Julianne’s voice trembled.
“There were more than forty missed calls.”
I closed my eyes.
Agent Cole asked, “Did he open any messages?”
“Yes.”
My eyes opened.
“Which one?”
Julianne looked directly at me.
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Think.”
“He opened a preview.”
“What did it say?”
She hesitated.
“Something about ICU.”
Everything inside me went silent.
He knew.
Maybe not everything.
But enough.
Enough to call.
Enough to ask.
Enough to be a father.
“What did he do?”
Julianne covered her mouth.
“He cursed.”
I waited.
“He said, ‘She’s using Lily again.’”
My hands curled into fists beneath the table.
“And then?”
“He blocked you.”
I stared at her.
Julianne began crying harder.
“I believed him.”
“You watched a father receive forty emergency calls about his child and believed him?”
Her face crumpled.
“Yes.”
There was nothing useful I could say to that.
Agent Cole asked, “Did he know Lily might die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he see the ICU reference?”
“Yes.”
“Did he intentionally block Maya afterward?”
“Yes.”
Cole wrote something down.
I stood.
I could no longer sit in that room.
Julianne whispered, “Maya.”
I stopped.
“I’m sorry.”
I turned.
“You should be.”
She nodded through tears.
I left.
That night, I finally listened to Lily’s hospital recording.
I sat alone on the floor of her bedroom.
Her stuffed rabbit rested beside me.
I pressed play.
Static filled the tiny speaker.
Then Lily’s voice.
Weak.
Sleepy.
Still unmistakably hers.
“Daddy?”
I covered my mouth.
“I’m at the hospital again.”
A pause.
“Mommy says you’re on vacation.”
Another pause.
“I hope the ocean is pretty.”
I began crying.
Then Lily said something that destroyed every wall I had built around myself.
“Can you come home before I wake up?”
I pressed the recorder against my chest.
Her final words were barely louder than a whisper.
“I don’t want Mommy to be scared by herself.”
For fourteen days, I thought Lily had needed David.
In that moment I understood.
Even while dying, my daughter had been worried about me.
May you like
And the next morning, I decided that if David wanted a courtroom fight, I would give him one.
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