324 Nights. Not One Was Mine Chapter 05
I knew who he was.
Nathan Hale. Active-duty Army major. The husband of Lindsay, my husband’s mistress.
Because of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East—and the government’s push to keep recruitment and retention numbers up—the marriages of active-duty service members had been given expanded legal protections in 2027.
The Servicemembers’ Wartime Marriage Protection Act.
Which was why Nathan hadn’t shown up with a sidearm and put a bullet in Ethan. He’d come with police. And Military Police.
His eyes swept the room, cold, and stopped on Ethan’s face.
“Ethan Prescott. You are under suspicion of engaging in a long-term extramarital relationship with the spouse of an active-duty service member. You are being summoned for questioning pursuant to federal statute.”
Every person in the room froze.
Margaret recovered first. She started shrieking. “Officer, you came just in time! It was *her*! She was cheating and got caught, and now she’s lost her mind!”
Chloe jabbed her finger at me. “Yes! She refuses to sign the divorce papers, and she attacked us!”
I braced myself on the floor, clutching my torn collar together. My knees and lower back throbbed.
But when I saw the color drain from Ethan’s face, only one thought filled my head.
Finally. Now *he* was afraid.
Nathan walked straight to me. He shrugged out of his uniform coat and draped it over my shoulders. Then he turned and looked at Ethan, his face hard.
The coat still held the warmth of his body. It smelled faintly of cedar and leather.
“Lindsay is my lawfully wedded wife.”
“I’m an active-duty major. My marriage certificate and my officer identification are here.”
He handed the documents to the officer in charge. His voice was low and cold.
“I already covered the specifics on the phone. You can see the injuries on her for yourselves.”
The lead officer glanced through the papers, then swept his eyes over the wreckage in the living room—the blood at the corner of my mouth, my torn shirt—and his expression darkened.
“All right, nobody moves. Preserve the scene.”
Ethan tried to hold his composure, but his voice had gone thin.
“Officer, there’s been a misunderstanding. This is just a domestic disagreement between husband and wife.”
I stood slowly, still wrapped in Nathan’s coat, and wiped the blood off my lip.
“A domestic disagreement—so you needed a divorce agreement and a settlement waiver drafted in advance?”
“A domestic disagreement—so you needed to print over three hundred hotel receipts and accuse me of adultery in front of your family and my neighbors?”
“A domestic disagreement—so you needed three people to hold me down on the floor and tear my clothes off in public?”
My voice wasn’t loud, but the entire room went dead silent.
Ethan’s face darkened. He tried to say something, but I cut him off.
“Officer, I’d like to formally request that you subpoena his phone, the hotel surveillance footage, parking records, and any related text messages and financial transfers.”
“Whether or not a crime was committed isn’t going to be settled by his mouth.”
Ethan’s pupils shrank.
I knew exactly what he was afraid of.
After I died the first time, Lindsay moved into my old home. They stopped hiding. They talked openly about the past.
Those hotel records? They were only the beginning.
Texts. Wire transfers. Parking receipts. Gift receipts. Even the voice memos where they’d plotted how to get rid of me. Every scrap of evidence had been there.
Before, I hadn’t been able to touch any of it.
This time, he wouldn’t get to bury it.
Then Nathan lifted his hand and tapped an audio file on his phone.
Lindsay’s voice came through first.
“Your mom’s got everything set, right? Evelyn’s not really going to dig her heels in, is she?”
Then Ethan’s voice, low and hushed.
“Relax. Once the records hit the table, she won’t have a leg to stand on. She signs, and it’s over.”
“The whole family’s there tonight—the bigger the scene, the better. She won’t recover from this.”
The recording cut out. The room was completely silent.
The color drained from Margaret’s face in visible increments.
Chloe’s phone slipped from her hand and hit the floor. The screen cracked on impact.
The neighbors in the doorway drew in a collective breath. The same eyes that had been feeding on the spectacle seconds ago were now filled with shock and mortification.
“Oh my God… this… this flipped?”
“So it was *Ethan* the whole time?”
“His whole family set up his own wife?”
“Jesus Christ, that’s sick.”
Margaret snapped first. She lunged for the phone.
“It’s fake! It’s all fake! You conspired against my son!”
An officer stepped in front of her. “Ma’am, step back!”
She flinched, but she wasn’t done.
“Even if my son *did* have something going on with that Lindsay girl, that’s on *her*! She’s the shameless one who seduced him! What does that have to do with my son?!”
The lead officer looked at her flatly.
“Ma’am, you just publicly verbally abused, assaulted, and stripped a woman of her clothing in front of witnesses. You’re potentially in violation of multiple state statutes.”
“The materials you all prepared in advance, the recordings you took, the fact that you barred her from leaving—all of that is going into the investigation.”
Margaret’s legs buckled. She nearly hit the floor.
She grabbed Ethan’s arm. “Honey! Honey, say something! Explain it to the officer!”
But Ethan couldn’t help himself, let alone her.
He was staring at me, and for the first time, real fear had bled into his eyes.
“Evelyn. How long have you known?”
I looked at him, and I smiled.
“What—did you really think you were the smartest person in the room?”
“Did you really think you could do all of this and never pay for it?”
His face went ugly.
The officers began collecting evidence.
The torn divorce agreement. The waiver. The wine glass shards on the floor. My ripped blouse. The phone Chloe had been recording with. The glass Margaret had thrown. Piece by piece, they were bagged and tagged.
A young officer noticed the blood on my knee and the split at my lip and frowned.
“Ma’am, who did this to you?”
I raised my hand, calmly, and pointed.
“Her. Her. And him.”
Margaret shrieked, “I did not! I’m his *mother*—so I said a few things, gave her a shove! What’s the crime in that?!”
“Right!” Chloe was in a panic now. “It’s a family argument! Since when is that illegal?!”
The lead officer’s face went stone-cold.
“Ma’am, in this state, public humiliation, tearing at another person’s clothing, physical assault, and restraining someone against their will are all chargeable offenses. This isn’t ‘a family matter.'”
The neighbors in the doorway finally started to look afraid.
Some quietly began deleting the videos they’d just shot.
Others eased backward, trying not to be recognized as the ones who’d been egging things on.
I looked at their familiar faces, and it was like ice inside me.
Before time rewound, they’d stood in this same doorway and watched me be trampled. Later, when they heard I’d jumped from my balcony, they’d all shaken their heads and said, “Poor thing. She must have been so unstable.” As if the words that pushed me over the edge hadn’t come out of their own mouths.
This time, I wasn’t giving anyone the chance to play innocent.
I looked up at the ones who’d been filming.
“Officer, they took a lot of video just now.”
“If any of it circulates, I’ll pursue defamation and invasion of privacy charges against every one of them.”
Faces changed on the spot.
“No, no—we were just filming, that’s all!”
“Deleting it right now, right now!”
“Mrs. Prescott—I mean, Ms. Whitmore—we, we were misled, we didn’t know—”
I didn’t look at them again.
Late-arriving guilt was the cheapest kind.
Ethan was cuffed and led out. At the door he jerked back around and snarled at me.
“Evelyn! Are you really doing this?!”
“After everything we had together—not a shred of feeling left?”
I almost laughed.
“When you and your whole family framed me for cheating, forced me out with nothing, and tore my clothes off in public—did you spare a shred of feeling?”
“When you and Lindsay plotted to pin all of it on me and drive me over the edge—did you?”
He choked on it. His face went blotchy red and white.
I looked at him and said, one word at a time,
“Don’t worry. This is only the beginning.”
—