The Wife He Tried To Erase Chapter 10
His trembling hand pressed the last recording.
The timestamp showed it was the day before she disappeared.
That was the eve of what was called the one hundredth treatment.
This time, there was no sound of the monitor in the recording.
Only Emilia’s faint breathing could be heard, as if her vitality was slowly slipping away.
The recorder slipped from his fingers and fell onto the carpet.
Nicholas stood frozen in place. A flash of lightning split the night sky outside the window, illuminating his face, pale and bloodless.
In that instant, a tremendous sense of panic engulfed him like a tidal wave.
That sentence, “I don’t love you anymore,” terrified him more than any curse.
He had always been certain that Emilia loved him as if her life depended on it. No matter how he tormented her, how he neglected her, she would always wait for him.
This was the source of his reckless confidence.
But now, that confidence was shattered.
At that moment, the study door was knocked urgently.
Elroy Wilkins pushed the door open, his face grim, disregarding all etiquette: “Mr. Gallagher, something has happened.”
Nicholas spun around abruptly, his eyes bloodshot: “Speak!”
“We couldn’t reach Mrs. Gallagher, so we checked her mother’s hospital account, hoping to track her location through payment records…”
Elroy swallowed, his voice trembling.
“It turns out, her mother… passed away two days ago.”
“What?” Nicholas’s pupils contracted violently.
“Not only that, because the account was overdue and medication was stopped, the body remained in the morgue unclaimed, and yesterday the hospital cremated it as an unclaimed corpse.”
“Mrs. Gallagher… Mrs. Gallagher no longer needed to return for medical expenses.”
Dead?
The only leverage over Emilia, the mother she valued more than her own life, was dead?
And it was because he stopped the medication?
Nicholas felt the world spinning before his eyes. He gripped the edge of the table just to stay upright.
“Who stopped the medication? I said to stop it, but I didn’t t…”
Before he finished speaking, he suddenly remembered the phone call he made in the study half a month ago.
He had given the order himself, to force Emilia to paint, to pave the way for Valentina.
It was him.
He had personally severed Emilia’s last attachment to this world.
“And…” Elroy handed over a document, his hand trembling.
Nicholas opened the file with shaking hands.
The first page was the confession letter from the director of the sanatorium.
“Ms. Hughes gave me 100,000 dollars, demanding that Emilia’s Modified Electroconvulsive Therapy voltage be tripled and that hallucinogens be injected to induce memory confusion.”
Boom—
Nicholas’s mind went completely blank, with only a buzzing roar in his ears.
These three years.
What had he been doing?
For a thief full of lies, he had personally broken his wife’s wings, driven her mad, and killed her mother.
Those one hundred shocks.
Every time she trembled behind the glass.
Every time she woke up, her eyes were lost and filled with pain.
“Nicholas, it hurts so much…”
The voice from the recorder echoed in his mind again, every word turning into a sharp blade, torturing his heart.
“Prepare the car.”
Nicholas rushed toward the door, his voice hoarse beyond recognition.
“Go to the Hughes’ residence! Bring Valentina to me!”