Part 4 — A Few Minutes Before the Operation, My Husband Asked Me to Save His Mistress, but One Question from Me Changed Everyone’s Face in the Room

Chris slowly lowered the phone.

No one moved in the room.

Mira held out her hand.

“Put it on speaker.”

“No,” Chris said.

“It is already too late,” I answered.

He pressed the screen once more. Madison’s voice sounded in the room, hoarse and angry.

“You told me Audrey would become the donor. You signed it. You told me that if anything happened, the doctor would erase everything.”

Chris leaned against the wall.

“Madison, shut up.”

“Now you want me to shut up? You are not the father of my child, and still you made me believe that we would create a family. And then your wife was supposed to be killed?”

Evans looked at the phone.

“End this call.”

Mira shook her head.

“No. This recording is important to us.”

“This is a live conversation,” I said.

“Even better,” she answered. “They are speaking in their own words.”

Chris looked toward me.

“Audrey, I did not want you to die.”

“You were simply ready for the possibility that I might die.”

That difference seemed to silence him for the first time.

A few minutes later the police came to the hospital. Their footsteps could be clearly heard in the corridor. Chris sat on a chair, his hands placed on his knees, and wore on his finger the wedding ring I had given him.

One officer told him:

“Mr. Foster, we have several questions for you.”

“My lawyer will come soon.”

Mira packed her bag.

“She will not come.”

Chris raised his head.

“What are you saying?”

“This morning I ended my representation of you. I am appearing as a witness against you.”

I saw such astonishment on his face, as if he had understood for the first time that people could also leave him.

Evans was led down the corridor. Chris followed behind. He looked at me once.

“Do you still love me?”

I had asked myself this question for years. At that moment I knew the answer calmly.

“I loved you once. But love does not mean that I will go down with your crime.”

The next day I went to Chris’s office. The building was almost empty. The employees whispered, while bank representatives stored the computers and documents.

A small device lay on the desk in Chris’s office. It was a voice recorder that I had given him six years earlier, when he had his first meeting with investors.

Mira turned on the recording.

Chris’s old voice sounded in the room.

“Audrey will put everything in order. She will always do this for me.”

Then another voice.

“If she agrees to the donation, she will not notice the transfer of the patents.”

The recorder lay on the desk, but I could no longer hear my own words. I listened only to what he had said, and for the first time understood that, to him, my loyalty was not a person but a tool.

Mira switched off the recorder.

“You can cry,” she told me.

“No,” I answered. “Not yet.”

That same evening I returned home.

My closet was half empty. Chris had taken his clothes, two watches, and the box of photographs. On the table only one picture remained—the day of our wedding, where I was laughing while he was looking toward someone behind the camera.

The coat hung on the hanger.

The gray fabric retained the smell of rain. The small copper leaf was still sewn onto the collar.

I had made that stitch myself.

That night, for the first time, I did not wait for him to open the door.

Three weeks later I went to court. The judge left the assets connected with Chris’s company temporarily under my control. The patents were returned to me because it was confirmed that I was the main source of their creation and financing.

Chris tried to reduce his responsibility.

“I was only helping the family,” he said.

The judge looked at the papers.

“You falsified someone else’s medical data and obtained property through deception. This is not called help.”

Evans lost his professional license. A separate criminal case was opened against him. Madison sent me a letter from the hospital, but I did not open it. She herself chose Chris, and Chris chose power. Correcting their choice was no longer my duty.

Several months passed.

I moved from Seattle to Portland and opened a small law office. In the mornings I met clients, and in the evenings I helped for free women who were being financially controlled.

A new plant stood on my desk. Its leaves leaned toward the sun, like me.

One evening I was helping my nephew, Lucas, draw a picture. He drew a house, a tree, and a woman on the paper.

“This is you,” he told me.

“Why alone?”

“Because here you are at peace.”

The child’s answer struck me more strongly than any words of the court.

On the first day of winter I received a message from Chris.

“I want to talk to you. I understood everything. Maybe we can start over.”

I looked at the screen for several minutes. Then I wrote a reply.

“You want to start over. But I no longer want to return there.”

After sending it, I put the phone aside.

I did not open the second message.

That evening I returned home. The coat hung beside the door. The copper leaf shone under the warm lamp.

I carefully removed it from the collar, put it in a small box, and stored it in the closet.

It was no longer Chris’s coat.

It was evidence that once I had saved myself.

And for the first time, my life was no longer needed to save someone else.