Chapter 2 - SIX PEOPLE SAW
Detective Bennett took my phone.
Not permanently.
She photographed the message, documented the number, and asked me not to delete anything.
“Do you recognize the wording?” she asked.
“No.”
“Could Gregory have sent it?”
“He was in custody.”
“Messages can be scheduled or sent by someone else.”
I looked toward Wyatt.
He had a scrape across one cheek and small cuts on his hands from the rose bushes.
“Melanie had her phone,” he said.
“So did Brenda.”
Detective Bennett wrote both names.
The six people who witnessed some part of the assault were identified by morning.
Wyatt saw the entire attack.
Brenda saw it.
Melanie saw it.
The utility worker, Owen Parker, saw me fall and Gregory stand above me with the brick.
His apprentice, Luke Jensen, recorded Gregory raising it a second time.
The elderly man behind the curtain had seen everything from inside the house.
The problem was that nobody knew where he had gone.
Brenda and Melanie gave nearly identical statements.
They claimed I arrived angry.
They said I accused Melanie of seducing Wyatt.
They said Wyatt pushed Gregory first.
According to them, Gregory picked up the brick only after Wyatt knocked him into the garden.
Neither could explain the blood already running down my face before Wyatt moved toward him.
Luke’s recording captured Brenda laughing while I sat against the porch column.
Her voice was clear.
Let’s see if Wyatt still loves you with that face.
The video also captured Gregory saying:
You’re marrying the wrong daughter.
The first impact happened before Luke began filming.
Owen’s utility truck had two exterior cameras.
One faced the road.
The other covered the passenger side.
The angle did not show the brick hitting my face, but it captured Gregory’s arm completing the swing as my body moved sideways.
Wyatt caught me less than one second later.
“It’s not perfect,” Detective Bennett said. “But it supports the sequence.”
A neighbor across the street, Margaret Ellis, had a doorbell camera.
It recorded sound more clearly than images.
The audio included my mother’s laughter and Wyatt asking what Gregory had done.
Margaret had not seen the impact directly.
She heard it.
She saw the aftermath.
Her recording preserved Gregory ordering Wyatt to marry Melanie.
The witnesses did not all see the same thing.
That made them more credible.
Real events appear differently depending on where a person stands.
A coordinated lie sounds identical.
By noon, Gregory’s attorney was already calling the assault an accident during mutual combat.
Wyatt had pushed Gregory.
That part was true.
He pushed him after my father kicked away the phone and raised the brick again.
The order mattered.
Brenda told relatives that Wyatt attacked an older man because I had manipulated him.
Melanie posted a message online saying:
Some women create violence and then pretend to be victims of it.
The post disappeared within an hour.
Screenshots remained.
My surgery took place that afternoon.
Doctors repaired the fracture and closed the wound above my eyebrow.
When I woke, my left eye was covered.
Pain radiated across my face in slow waves.
Wyatt sat beside me.
“You’re still here,” I whispered.
“Of course.”
“My mother thought you’d leave.”
“She was wrong.”
“You don’t have to say that because I’m hurt.”
“I said it before you were hurt.”
I remembered him standing between Gregory and me.
I also remembered my father pointing the brick toward Melanie like she was a prize.
“Did they plan it?”
“The assault?”
“The dinner.”
Wyatt looked down.
“Melanie sent me a message yesterday morning.”
“What did it say?”
He showed me after asking whether I felt strong enough.
TONIGHT YOU FINALLY GET A CHANCE TO CORRECT YOUR MISTAKE.
I asked what she meant.
She wrote:
SADIE WILL UNDERSTAND AFTER DINNER.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought it was another attempt to provoke us.”
“It was.”
“I blocked her.”
My stomach tightened.
“Did you preserve it?”
“Yes.”
I had spent years calling my family controlling, selfish, and cruel.
I had not believed they would arrange violence.
Wyatt rested one hand beside mine rather than taking it without warning.
“The police found signs that someone left through the rear garden,” he said.
“The old man?”
“Possibly.”
“Was he hurt?”
“They don’t know.”
“What did my father do when he saw him?”
“Gregory tried to enter the house.”
“To stop him leaving.”
“That’s what Detective Bennett thinks.”
The police found a teacup in the living room, a second plate at the dining table, and marks near the rear door suggesting a cane had scraped against the frame.
There had been another guest.
Brenda and Melanie continued denying it.
Detective Bennett searched the name Sloan & Mercer.
The law firm closed nine years earlier.
Its surviving founding partner was Henry Sloan, age seventy-nine.
He drafted estate documents for my paternal grandmother, Beatrice Davis.
He was listed as deceased in one private family record.
Public databases showed he was alive.
Henry lived inside an assisted-living community forty miles away.
When police arrived, his room was empty.
A nurse said a woman identifying herself as his niece collected him that afternoon.
Henry had no niece.
Security footage showed the woman wearing sunglasses and a scarf.
Her vehicle belonged to a shell company registered at the same address as Melanie’s boutique.
I stared at the paused image.
“Melanie took him.”
“Or someone used her company’s car,” Detective Bennett said.
“Why?”
“We need to locate him before deciding.”
At 8:16 that evening, Henry’s assisted-living facility received a voicemail.
The caller whispered:
May you like
“Tell Sadie the marriage date changes everything.”
The voice belonged to Henry Sloan.
