Once.
Twice.
On the third time, a new message appeared.
No subject.
From Vanessa.
My pulse hammered as I opened it.
There was no text.
Only an attachment.
A video file.
My cursor hovered over it.
Some animal part of me already knew not to click.
But I did.
The video opened in a hotel room.
Dim lighting.
A bed.
Vanessa’s laugh behind the camera.
And me.
Drunk.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, shirt half unbuttoned, speaking into the lens.
At first, I couldn’t make out my words.
Then the audio sharpened.
“I’m telling you,” video-me slurred, smiling stupidly, “once the baby’s older, I’ll make it happen.”
Vanessa’s voice from behind the camera: “Make what happen?”
“I’ll leave.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
I watched myself laugh.
Then Vanessa asked, “And Hannah?”
Video-me shrugged.
“She’ll be fine. She’s stronger than she looks.”
“And the baby?”
My stomach clenched.
In the video, I rubbed my face and said, “I don’t know. Babies don’t remember anything anyway.”
I slammed the laptop shut.
The room went silent.
My breathing came in ragged bursts.
Babies don’t remember anything anyway.
I had no memory of saying it.
But there I was.
Saying it.
Maybe drunk.
Maybe trying to impress Vanessa.
Maybe careless in the way only selfish people can be careless—assuming words disappear because they were spoken in private.
My phone buzzed.
Vanessa again.
“Imagine how that sounds in court.”
I stared at the message.
Another came.
“Don’t make me angry, Trevor.”
Then another.
“You don’t get to ruin my life and crawl back to your wife.”
I felt something cold settle inside me.
For the first time since coming home to the empty house, I understood something.
Hannah had not only escaped me.
She had escaped Vanessa too.
And maybe Hannah had known before I did that Vanessa was not just a mistake.
She was a threat.
I forwarded the email to myself, to a new folder, then saved the video to a drive.
Then I called my attorney.
I didn’t have one, not really. Just a corporate lawyer I had once used for a contract issue. He gave me the name of a family law attorney and told me, in a voice stripped of warmth, “Do not delete anything. Do not contact your mistress again. Do not contact your wife directly. Get representation immediately.”
Mistress.
The word sounded uglier when someone else said it.
That afternoon, I drove to a law office in North Dallas and sat across from a woman named Marisol Grant.
She was compact, direct, and unimpressed by my misery.
She read Hannah’s filing.
She examined the receipts.
She watched the video.
