“My stolen phone is the only reason I have the case number in the first place,” Isla says, her voice completely vacant and deadpan.
I cough to clear my throat. “Right.”
I glance at her as a high-pitched buzzing sounds from inside my ears. She doesn’t look at me. She merely sits, stoic and stiff, her hands still folded in her lap.
She didn’t have her phone on October seventeenth. You couldn’t get a hold of her for days. Then the messages came through. Then she never answered her phone again.
Something reeks so badly of foul play that I can barely breathe.
“Um,” I utter as the high-pitched buzz in my ears morphs into a steady, bass thump. “I um…”
You have to tell her about the messages. You have to tell him, too.
Officer Miller lifts his bushy, salt-and-pepper brows expectantly. “Did you have any questions for me, Mr… I mean, Your Highness?”
I force a dry, weak chuckle. “There’s no need for the formalities.” I cough again. “I… um…”
I look at Isla again, who still hasn’t even moved, and something that feels like a red-hot poker drives itself through my heart. It’s so intense that I absently drag my fingertips across the buttons on my shirt in an attempt to wipe it away as I stand up.
“I received text messages from her phone three days after that date,” I finally say, and saying it out loud seems to solidify the reality of this situation in my own mind, and my stomach twists so violently I nearly double over. I’m immediately so sick that I become lightheaded.
The kind of sick that results from the realization that you may have made a terrible, life-altering mistake.
And, after eleven long,wretchedyears, it’s suddenly crystal clear that I did.
Officer Miller’s features lift with interest. “Did you? Do you recall what they said?”
I look at Isla for even longer this time. She shows no reaction of any kind to the information. I know that, in my fevered haze a couple of weeks prior, I told her that our relationship ended as a result of those text messages, but I recall the vagueness of my informing her, and I can’t be sure if she’s making the connection between this incident and those messages.
But the connection is clear enough in my own mind, and I recall every unspeakable thing I’ve done to her as a result of my anger over what I believed she’d done, and I nearly sway on my feet under the weight of how wrong I was.
How cruel I was.
How many transgressions I committed against her because I believed she was guilty as sin, when in reality, she had been victimized by punks who… what? Thought it would be funny to ruin a relationship by sending fraudulent messages from her phone and including a photo that, in retrospect, is obviously visual evidence of rape?
How naïve, and stupid, and gullible I was to actuallybelieve it.
“I actually…” I start to say, but then my face flushes cold as my stomach turns again.
I’ve looked at that photo so many times that I have it burned into my brain.
Under the pretense of what I previously believed, it does look like she was engaging the two guys in the photo. Butnow… and I’ll have to look at it again—and I’m going tohave tolook at it again—it seems like it was something else entirely.
“Mr. Sterling?” Officer Miller’s voice shakes me out of my racing thoughts. “You were saying?”
I blink to clear my vision. “Yes, I was saying I actually still have the phone that the messages were sent to.” I take a wobbly step away from the sofa. “Excuse me for a moment while I retrieve it.”
“By all means.” He waves casually at me, and then turns to Isla. “I’m sure this information is unpleasant, and you may be in a bit of shock. That’s normal. I would recommend seeking out some form of therapy to help you process it.”
Isla doesn’t acknowledge him as I step into the bedroom, andyes, she will absolutely be in therapy after this. I will probably need therapy, too. That is, if I don’t hang myself first.
Sifting through my luggage, I locate the phone and power it on. Opening the message thread causes my hands to shake, and even though I’ve looked at all of it countless times, it suddenly looks different.
The photo…
The one I thought was of her having a sordid threesome… it no longer looks like that at all.
She’s slumped and contorted into an awkward posture, with one guy holding her hips while the other is holding her head in place with two fistfuls of her hair. Her arms are draped limply over the edge of a bed that I know from every time we’d done a video chat wasn’t hers. Someone totally uninvolved snapped a perfectly framed, perfectly clear picture of it. Her eyes aren’t evenopen.
