Chapter 5
Marco denied it first. Then he realized denial would die faster than truth, so he admitted enough to keep breathing.
“Yes,” he said. “I was there.”
Bianca told him to shut up. I ignored her.
Marco said he followed Elena to the north overlook because he learned Bianca had moved the route and wanted to stop whatever humiliation she had planned. He claimed he believed it was still about pressure, about frightening Elena into leaving me alone for a while. He said he did not yet understand how far Bianca had already gone.
I believed that part only because it was the weakest thing he could have confessed to and still called himself innocent.
The next recording answered the part he would not say.
Elena had hidden the camera again. I could hear wind. I could hear her breathing. Then Bianca’s voice came in sharp and angry. Elena laughed at something she said. Even two years later, I could picture that laugh perfectly. Elena never gave Bianca the fear she wanted.
“What did she say?” I asked.
Marco swallowed. “She told Bianca she had spent her whole life confusing being feared with being loved.”
Bianca flinched hard enough that even the men standing behind her noticed.
That one sentence apparently did what all of Bianca’s planning could not. It made things personal enough to become reckless.
Marco admitted Bianca grabbed Elena. Victor tried to separate them. Elena broke free and ran toward her car. But Bianca had already moved it to block the exit. Elena backed away from her near the wet stone edge of the overlook and slipped. She hit her head. She was unconscious, but alive.
Alive.
I said the word out loud because I needed everyone on that terrace to hear it the way I was hearing it.
“Alive.”
Marco lowered his head. Bianca closed her eyes.
Victor wanted to take her back to the estate immediately. Bianca refused. She said if Elena woke up and told me what happened, everything would collapse. So they put my unconscious wife into her own car and drove her away from the overlook.
I stared at Marco. “And you let that happen?”
His answer came out broken.
“I did nothing.”
That was more honest than anything else he had said all day. Not that he was innocent. Not that he was helpless. Only that he saw enough to act and chose not to.
Then he gave me the next wound.
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“Elena didn’t die at the overlook,” he said. “She was alive when we put her in the car.”
That was when I stopped remembering my wife’s death as an accident at all.
