The latest one came from an unknown number.
Ryan stared at the screen as if it had accused him out loud.
Then he noticed the notifications still showing.
His own video from Aspen.
The one where he had laughed into the camera.
Here’s to surviving high-maintenance wives.
The room tilted around him.
He dropped the phone and staggered backward.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no.”
He dialed 911 with fingers that could barely press the buttons.
When the dispatcher answered, Ryan’s voice came out shattered.
“My wife,” he said. “My wife and baby are gone. There’s blood everywhere. I—I just got home. I don’t know what happened.”
The dispatcher asked for his address.
Ryan gave it.
She asked when he had last seen us.
His mouth opened.
No words came.
Because the truth sounded monstrous before anyone else even heard it.
Three days earlier.
The last time he had seen his wife, she had been bleeding on the nursery floor three days earlier.
And then he had left.
By the time police arrived, Ryan was sitting in the hallway outside the nursery, his hands clasped behind his neck, rocking slightly.
Two officers entered first.
Then paramedics.
Then detectives.
Their expressions changed when they saw the blood.
One officer told Ryan to stand up.
Another asked where he had been.
Ryan answered like a machine.
Aspen.
Birthday trip.
Friends.
Resort.
Got back twenty minutes ago.
His words landed in the room and died there.
Detective Laura Bennett entered last.
She was in her early forties, with dark hair threaded with silver and pulled into a low ponytail, and eyes sharp enough to make people confess things before they had even been questioned.
She looked at the blood.
Then at the empty bassinet.
Then at Ryan.
“Mr. Parker,” she said, “where is your wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is your son?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you leave the house?”
“Friday morning.”
“And when did you notice your wife was injured?”
Ryan swallowed.
“She said she was bleeding.”
Detective Bennett’s face did not change.
“She said?”
“She’d just had a baby. I thought…”
He stopped himself.
There was no harmless way to finish that sentence.
The detective stepped closer.
“You thought what?”
Ryan looked down at the nursery floor.
“I thought she was exaggerating.”
The silence afterward felt worse than yelling.
“Did you call a doctor?” Bennett asked.
“No.”
“Did you call an ambulance?”
“No.”
“Did you check on the baby?”
Ryan’s face collapsed.
“No.”
Detective Bennett watched him for a long second.
Then she said, “You need to come with us.”
“I didn’t hurt them,” Ryan said quickly.
“No one said you did.”
But the way she looked at him made it obvious that everyone was already thinking it.
At the police station, Ryan told the story again.
And again.
Each time, it sounded worse.
He had left his wife, ten days postpartum, alone with a newborn while she was actively bleeding and begging for help.
He had ignored her calls because, as his friends later admitted, he had said, “She’s trying to ruin my birthday.”
He had posted videos of himself drinking whiskey on a heated balcony while I was unconscious.
He had not called once.
Not once in three days.
