324 Nights. Not One Was Mine Chapter 06
After they took Ethan out, the room felt suddenly emptied.
Margaret and Chloe finally understood. They started to panic.
Margaret dropped to her knees in front of me and grabbed for the hem of my pants.
“Evelyn, honey, I was wrong! I was angry, I lost my head, I didn’t know anything—”
“Please talk to the officer, tell them family business should stay in the family, don’t blow this up—”
I looked down at her, at that face swollen with tears and snot, and felt only revulsion.
Before time rewound, when I’d knelt in front of her and begged her to believe me, what had she said?
She’d said, “Filth like you deserves to die.”
Now, at last, it was her turn to kneel.
I stepped back, out of reach.
“Don’t say my name. You don’t get to.”
“And you did know. You were the first to know.”
Her face froze.
I looked up at the officer.
“She admitted it herself, just now—she wanted me thrown out with nothing so she could make room for someone else. I have every reason to believe today’s entire show—the hotel receipts, the divorce agreement, the covert filming—was staged in advance by all three of them.”
“I want formal charges filed. False accusation, public humiliation, assault, and unlawful restraint.”
Chloe lost it completely.
“Evelyn, wait, I was—I lost my temper for a second! I wasn’t actually going to hurt you!”
“You weren’t *not* hurting me.” I glanced at her still-red hand. “You just didn’t get to finish.”
Her face went white.
The officers took Margaret and Chloe in for statements too.
Before he left, Nathan looked at me. His tone was gentler this time.
“Ms. Whitmore, you’re hurt. Get to a hospital first.”
“I’ll cooperate fully with the follow-up.”
I nodded.
“Thank you.”
He hesitated, then added just one thing.
“You take care of yourself first.”
I lowered my eyes and didn’t answer.
The one who really deserved thanks was myself.
For not sinking down again this time.
The hospital results came in quickly.
Soft tissue contusions. Mild concussion. Laceration on the lip. Abrasions on the knees. Bruising along both arms where they’d been gripped and torn at.
I handed the injury report, the recordings, the videos, and both documents to my lawyer. Everything.
She flipped through the file, looked up, and said only one thing.
“Ms. Whitmore. This isn’t an ordinary divorce.”
“We can take them for everything they’ve got.”
I looked at her calmly.
“I don’t want them bankrupt.”
“I want to make sure not one of them walks away clean.”
The night I came out of the precinct, I sat alone in my car and cried, quietly, for the first time.
It wasn’t grief.
It was the shudder of realizing I was still alive.
Before time rewound, in the last moments before I died, the same question kept spinning through my head.
Why, when I had done nothing, would no one believe me?
Why did the people who’d hurt me get to live shining, respectable lives, while *I* became the one everyone spit on?
Now, finally, I was going to give every one of those *whys* back to the people they belonged to.
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