Chapter 7 - What She Said to an Empty Room

I replayed the last five seconds.

Mom reached toward the nursery camera, irritated that it was still recording.

Under her breath, she said, "Once that girl signs, this gets easier."

Then darkness.

Dana told us not to touch the nursery until she had arranged for someone to document everything.

The next morning, an investigator came with us to the house. Behind a stack of old prenatal folders, exactly where Mom had placed it, he found the recorder.

The battery was dead.

But the memory card was still inside.

I wanted to play it immediately. Dana stopped me.

"Copy it first. Preserve the original."

By noon, we had the files.

Hours of our private life had been captured.

Some recordings were only empty-room noise. Others held pieces of arguments between Savannah and me—normal disagreements about money, baby names, whether my work hours were getting out of control.

Then we found files recorded when neither of us was home.

Mom's voice.

Another woman's voice.

"He won't sign away the house himself," the woman said.

Mom answered, "He already has. He just doesn't know it yet."

My mouth went dry.

The woman laughed nervously. "Bernice, that's not funny."

"I'm not joking."

Dana stopped the file.

"Do you recognize the second voice?"

I did.

"Elaine Mercer. My mother's paralegal."

Elaine had worked for our family attorney for almost twenty years. She had attended my wedding. She sent Savannah a baby gift.

We listened again.

Elaine said, "If Christopher ever challenges the signature, I'm not taking the blame."

Mom replied, "He won't. My son avoids conflict. He always has."

That sentence felt like a hand closing around my throat.

She wasn't wrong.

At least she hadn't been.

Dana leaned back. "This changes things."

"Can we go to the police?"

"We can take this to them, yes. But understand something: once you do, your relationship with your mother may never recover."

Savannah looked at me, but she didn't speak.

She was waiting for me to decide without putting the weight on her.

I thought about Dad's letter.

Control disguised as love.

I thought about Savannah on the floor.

Then I called the detective listed on the police report.

Before he answered, my phone buzzed with a message from Mom.

A photo appeared on the screen.

It was Savannah, leaving a counseling office three years earlier.

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Under it, Mom had written:

ASK YOUR WIFE WHAT ELSE SHE'S BEEN HIDING FROM YOU.