The whole way I drove with anger roiling like a furnace behind my ribs. I tried to make sense of it, how a love that had filled every corner of me could, in the span of a breath, curdle into something bitter and absolute. Davis was an enigma of ruin: the man who had shredded so many lives, the man who had killed my father. And yet, once, against reason and better judgment, I had loved him with a sincerity that led me to marry him.
I let out a sharp, involuntary exhale and felt my teeth grind together. I snatched the phone from the dashboard, thumbed through names, and called my contact: Apollo.
"Hello, madam," he said the moment he picked up.
"Apollo, go to the Lake House. Make sure no one sees you, then take all the documents. I'll send you the safe box password. Once you're done, burn down the house. I'll tell you where to meet me afterward." My voice was cold and unyielding.
Silence answered on the other end. I could hear the tremor beneath Apollo's breath, hesitation, fear, and why wouldn't he be afraid? We were about to walk into flames of our own making.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked. Apollo was never the man to second-guess me, never one to weigh consequences for long. His pause made the crime feel heavier. It made me feel it too. I had no illusions, this was the opening of a war I hadn't fully mapped in my head.
"Do as I said," I replied, flat and final, and I hung up. I sent the password, then let the phone fall back onto the dash like a spent token.
Since Davis had decided to shatter my heart, since he had turned our life into a game, I had no choice but to answer with force, just as I had promised in the letter I wrote thirty minutes before leaving home. I had vowed to annihilate everything he cherished, and I meant to keep that vow. After all, some fires are only put out by other fires.
My head spun like a weather vane in a storm. My husband was not a man to be toyed with. I had seen the wreckage left in the wake of those who dared cross him. If I intended to go to war, I had to move as a careful soldier, mapping each step. The first order of business was simple and holy: protect the one person whose life mattered more than my own, my mother. I took the phone again and called her.
"Hello, Mama," I said as soon as she answered, shaping my voice into something ordinary so she would hear only calm and not the tremor beneath. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, my words moving on autopilot while my heartbeat refused to settle. Then I took a breath and went for it.
"Mama, can you get ready? I'm coming to pick you up, there's somewhere I want to take you," I said, turning onto Sinza Road where she lived, trying to bury the edge in my tone, to disguise the urgency clawing at my chest beneath the soft fabric of a surprise. But my hands on the wheel betrayed me, tight, restless, eager for something I couldn't yet name.
"What? Where now? Why so sudden?" her voice fluttered through the line, carrying that familiar mix of suspicion and curiosity only mothers can master.
"Ah, don't worry, Mama," I said, forcing a light chuckle that didn't quite reach my chest. "It's a surprise. That's why I didn't tell you earlier."
A brief pause. Then, softly but pointedly, she asked, "Alright then… but are you with your husband?" Her question made a hot, bitter salt rise in my throat. I ground my teeth against it.
"No, he's at work," I said evenly, pressing my tone into something polite, careful, controlled. I didn't want the irritation bleeding through, but it simmered there anyway, just beneath the surface.
"Okay then, let me get ready," she replied.
Just as we were about to hang up, a detail I couldn't forget flared up.
"Oh, and Mama, don't talk to him. If he calls, don't tell him anything. I want it to be a surprise."
We ended the call. No sooner had I set the phone down than it rang again. I reached for it, expecting my mother's voice, but the screen showed the number of the private investigator I'd hired to look into my friend Brenda's death.
"Hello," I said, holding the phone to my ear, bracing for whatever confirmation or new cruelty he might deliver, the last set of facts that had pushed me over the edge.
"Madam, I'm really sorry," he began. "There's been a complication. I traced the ID and discovered someone hacked my system."
His words slid into my ears but struck like a puzzle with missing pieces. For a moment they felt like a language I did not speak.
"What?" I asked, my face a mirror of the question.
"The information wasn't real," he said.
"What do you mean? Are you saying my husband didn't kill Brenda?" I demanded, the question sliding out before I could stop it. My eyes widened as if the truth might rearrange itself into something recognisable.
"Yes, Madam."
The world folded inward. I slammed the brakes so hard the car protested. The sudden stop jolted my bones and sent a spray of cold air through my spine. If what he said was true, then everything I had set in motion, every vow, every plan, was balanced on a lie. "Shit!" I cursed, fingers clenching the wheel so tightly the leather bit into my palms, my mind ricocheting back to the letter I had written, every line a furnace of accusation, every promise a match. I had hidden that letter behind the picture frame in our living room.
"No! No! No! No! No!"
The words tore out of me in a frantic rhythm as I shook my head, already spinning the wheel hard enough to make the tires protest. I whipped the car around, heart hammering against my ribs, desperate to get home, tear that damn letter to shreds, burn it, swallow it, something, anything to stop the avalanche I'd stupidly set rolling.
"This can't be happening," I muttered, voice cracking as the realization tightened around my throat. If that letter made it into Davis's hands, that man wouldn't just kill me. He'd do it with his bare hands and probably let the neighborhood dogs pick their teeth with my bones afterward.
I snatched my phone and dialed Apollo, praying he'd answer, praying the universe would cut me a break for once, but of course not. The line rang, and rang, and rang, each unanswered tone dragging my panic higher.
"Pick up, Apollo! Pick up!" I shouted, fingers drumming an anxious, chaotic beat on the steering wheel. The call cut out. He didn't answer.
"Shit!" I screamed, hurling the phone aside. It bounced and slid somewhere near the brake pedal, but I didn't care. I raked both hands through my hair, tugging at the roots as my thoughts spiraled, racing, colliding, exploding into a thousand wild possibilities that all ended the same way:
Me. Dead.
Over
a letter I never should've written.