PART 2
For three full seconds, Jack didn’t move.
He stood beneath the bright airport lights with his phone in his hand, his shoulders stiff, the laughter drained from his face so quickly it was almost like someone had switched off part of him.
The blonde woman beside him—her name was Vanessa, though I didn’t know it yet—leaned closer and said something I couldn’t hear.
Jack didn’t answer.
He kept staring at his screen.
Then Carol noticed.
Even from the upper walkway, I could read the shift in her expression. My mother-in-law had always been a woman who measured rooms before entering them. She understood tone, timing, appearances. A raised eyebrow from Carol Walker could silence a dinner table.
Now her sunglasses slid down the bridge of her nose as she looked from Jack’s face to his phone.
Ashley stopped laughing.
The children kept fidgeting with their backpacks, unaware of the invisible crack spreading through the adults around them.
“What did you send him?” Gerald asked quietly in my ear.
I kept my eyes on Jack. “What did you upload first?”
“The hospital records,” Gerald said. “Not to the public. Just to the secured folder linked to his attorney’s inbox, your attorney’s inbox, and the hospital board liaison, exactly as your instructions stated.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
Years ago, before I became Mrs. Walker, before PTA meetings and Thanksgiving menus and polite smiles across tense family dinners, I had been someone else entirely.
Not dramatic. Not dangerous.
