PART 2: Leaves shifted. A branch snapped. Someone was coming back.
I closed my fingers around the small black beacon. And prepared myself to scream.
“Mara?”
Sloane.
My sister-in-law stepped into the clearing alone. There was dirt on her cheek. She was breathing hard.
“Don’t yell.”
I stared at her. “You came back.”
“I had to wait until they reached the truck.” She grabbed the shovel.
She began digging with frantic, uneven movements.
“Careful!”
“I know!”
“No, you don’t. Don’t dig close to my stomach.”
For ten agonizing minutes, neither of us spoke. When I could finally move my arms, I clawed frantically at the soil around my chest. Air rushed deeper into my lungs. I nearly sobbed from relief. Eventually, I pulled one leg free. Then the other.
The moment I tried to stand, the world tilted. Sloane caught me. Blood rushed from my head.
“Mara!”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“My head.”
“No.” She pointed downward. Blood stained the inside of my jeans.
Every nerve in my body turned to ice. “No.”
I grabbed her wrist. “How far is the nearest road?”
Before she could answer, the beacon in my hand vibrated against my skin. Three short pulses. Emergency acknowledgment. Someone had finally received my signal.
But then we heard it. An engine. Not distant. Close.
Headlights swept through the trees. A heavy truck door slammed.
“Sloane!” my father-in-law’s angry voice echoed through the dark. “Your mother is losing patience.”
The first thing I remember clearly was not the shovel.
It was my daughter kicking.
One small, frightened movement beneath my ribs while the earth tightened around my chest.
That tiny kick was the moment I understood I could not afford to die.
“You brought another man’s child into my family.”
My mother-in-law, Vivian Caldwell, stood above me at the edge of the shallow pit, gripping a shovel with both hands.
The late-afternoon sun was behind her, reducing her expensive cream coat and perfectly styled blond hair to a dark silhouette.
She looked less like the elegant woman who chaired charity luncheons in three counties and more like something carved onto an old gravestone.
“You thought you could humiliate Ethan,” she continued. “You thought you could make fools of all of us.”
“It’s his baby!”
My voice broke as I twisted against the loose soil packed around my waist.
“Ethan, look at me.”
My husband stood several feet away.
He had dirt on the knees of his trousers.
His wedding ring caught the sunlight.
I stared at it.
Four years earlier, he had slipped that ring onto his finger and whispered that there was nothing in this world powerful enough to turn him against me.
Now he could not even look me in the eyes.
“Ethan,” I begged.
His jaw tightened.
“You know me.”
Nothing.
“You know I would never cheat on you.”
His father, Richard Caldwell, stepped forward and ripped my phone from my hand.
I had managed to keep it tucked inside the waistband of my jeans during the drive into the woods.
I had been waiting for one moment when they weren’t watching.
I never got it.
Richard looked at the screen.
“No signal anyway.”
He tossed the phone toward Vivian.
She caught it.
Then she dropped it beneath her boot.
The sound of the glass cracking was strangely quiet.
“There,” Vivian said. “Now there won’t be any more hysterical calls.”
“Hysterical?”
I stared at her.
“You kidnapped a pregnant woman.”
Vivian smiled.
“You’re family.”
“You dragged me into a truck!”
“You were becoming unreasonable.”
Richard lifted another shovel of dirt.
I tried to move.
“Don’t.”
But he dumped it beside my hip.
Cold soil spilled across my stomach.
I gasped.
“Stop!”
Another shovel.
“STOP!”
My heart began hammering so violently that the world pulsed at the edges of my vision.
“Please.”
That word was for Ethan.
Only Ethan.
He finally looked at me.
And somehow the emptiness in his expression frightened me more than Vivian’s anger.
“Maybe you should have thought about the consequences before humiliating me.”
I stared at the man I had shared a bed with the previous night.
A cut on my forehead had begun dripping again.
Warm blood slid through my eyebrow and into my left eye.
I blinked against it.
His sister, Sloane, stood behind him.
Thirty years old.
Pale.
Shaking.
Silent.
For half a second our eyes met.
There was terror in hers.
Not rage.
Not disgust.
Terror.
“Sloane,” I whispered.
She looked away.
Vivian noticed.
“Don’t start feeling sorry for her.”
“I’m not,” Sloane said quickly.
Her voice sounded wrong.
Vivian turned back to me.
“She’ll stay here until she’s ready to tell us the truth.”
“I already told you the truth.”
“The laboratory says otherwise.”
“The laboratory is wrong!”
Vivian gave me a cold smile.
“Science doesn’t make emotional excuses, Mara.”
I looked at Ethan again.
“Did you actually call the clinic?”
He said nothing.
“Did you?”
His silence answered me.
Three days earlier Vivian had arrived at our house carrying a white envelope.
Inside was a report from Westbridge Genetic Diagnostics.
PATERNITY EXCLUSION.
Probability of Ethan Caldwell being the biological father:
0.00%.
I had laughed when I first read it.
Actually laughed.
Because it was so absurd that my brain refused to understand the danger.
“That isn’t possible,” I had said.
Vivian hadn’t laughed.
Ethan hadn’t either.
The baby had been conceived naturally after nearly a year of trying.
There had been no donor.
No fertility clinic.
No separation.
No affair.
There had never been another man.
“I want another test,” I had demanded.
Vivian folded the report.
“We already have the answer.”
“No, you have a piece of paper.”
“From an accredited laboratory.”
“Then someone made a mistake.”
Vivian studied me.
“Or you did.”
That was the beginning.
Three days later, they had me buried to my shoulders in the woods.
The soil rose another inch.
Breathing became harder.
