MY HUSBAND'S TRAP CHAPTER 3

Enough to love me.

That’s how it was. The dagger wrapped up in a compliment. The trap wrapped up in trust.

"If you love me," he whispered, "then you will do this, and after it is done, believe me when I tell you, I will make it up to you for the rest of my life. I’ll give you anything, a wedding, the respect of my mother, a place in my family that can never be questioned."

Lottie looked into his face for the deception.

She couldn’t find it.

She wasn’t trying hard enough.

"Okay," she heard herself say, distant from where she was standing. "Okay, I’ll do it."

Geoffrey’s shoulders drooped as if with relief.

There was no relief.

There was victory.

The interrogation room was colder than the morgue that held the stranger she would never know.

The fluorescent lights above made the harsh white glow over the metal table and two plastic chairs. The air reeked of old coffee and cleaning agent. Lottie sat in the chair, hands clutched together on her lap, the plastic bracelet rubbing against her arm with each movement. Across from her, Detective Reyes sat, leaning slightly towards her, his kind eyes looking straight into hers, knowing full well that she was not telling the truth.

“I was driving,” Lottie said in a strained voice. “I didn’t see her. I panicked and ran away from the accident. I take complete responsibility.”

Reyes didn’t make any notes. He just looked at her.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said softly, “I’ve done this for a very long time. I’ve heard my share of confessions. Yours just doesn’t sound right.”

She forced herself to look into his eyes. “It’s true.”

“It is?” He cocked his head to one side. “Because the timeline is a mess. The surveillance footage from the parking garage shows the car leaving at 11:02. Your husband’s phone logs show that he was in the building until 11:14. Plus, the camera at the gas station three blocks away from the scene of the accident recorded a man resembling your husband filling up the tank alone at 10:47.”

Lottie’s heartbeat faltered. Geoffrey’s lawyers had fed her the story. They had not told her that the police already had evidence that didn’t fit.

“I… I think I must have left earlier,” she stammered. “I don’t know when exactly. I was very emotional. We had a fight.”

“Over what?”

She faltered. Her story did not include such details. “About… about money. His family. About the usual stuff.”

The voice remained soft, but the softness only added intensity to it. "Mrs. Smith, look at me. Really look at me. You're sitting there in a silk dress with champagne still staining its hem. You're wearing the same earrings you were wearing three nights ago when you were celebrating an anniversary dinner. Your hands are trembling so badly that your bracelet is constantly clinking against the table. And every time I mention your husband's name, a piece of you dies."

Lottie swallowed. "I'm simply exhausted."

"You're defending him."

"I'm telling the truth."

"No." Reyes bent forward. "You're repeating the story that they've rehearsed for you. I can tell from your eyes. Someone has coached you. Someone told you exactly what you need to say and how you should say it. And you're repeating it because you fear that if you do not, the man you love will be sent to prison and your world will be destroyed."

Her throat closed. In one awful instant, the wall she had spent so long building inside herself threatened to come crashing down.

Tell him.

Tell him everything now.

Tell him you were home. Tell him Geoffrey contacted you. Tell him everything about the promises and the threats and the way his mother had looked at you like some dirt under her feet.

But Geoffrey’s voice kept reverberating more strongly.

“If you really love me, you will do this.”

“You are the only one who loves me this much.”

Her fingernails raked her palm. “I did it.”

Reyes released a sigh, a look of disappointment crossing his face. “Alright then. Let’s start again from the beginning. At what time did you leave your home?”

“Eleven.”

“Where were you headed to?”

“I just… needed fresh air. I used my car. I didn’t even notice her. I hit her. I freaked out. I just drove off.”

“What was she like?”

Lottie stopped breathing. They’d never described anything to her. “I—I don’t remember. It was dark.”

“She wore a red coat,” Reyes whispered. “Very bright red. Hard to overlook, even during the night. And she held a white shopping bag from a boutique on Fifth Avenue. The bag was found thirty feet from where the body lay. Undamaged. No traces of blood on it. This means she was knocked down with enough strength for her to be flung that far, but you say that you ‘didn’t see her.’”

Lottie’s throat went dry. “I was distracted.”

“By what?”

“I have already told you, we argued.”

“What did your husband tell you, so that you became so angry that you left him?”

Lottie’s mouth fell open. No sound came out.

Reyes’ voice turned even quieter. “Mrs. Smith… Lottie. Do you mind if I call you by your first name?”

Lottie nodded.

“Lottie, I spoke to the medical examiner an hour ago. The victim’s injuries are consistent with a vehicle traveling at least fifty miles an hour. The coastal road has a thirty-five limit. Whoever was driving wasn’t just careless. They were either drunk, raging, or both. And the blood alcohol report on the car’s interior came back clean. No alcohol. No drugs. Just fingerprints.” He paused. “Most of them belonging to your husband. A few belonging to a woman whose prints are already in the system for a completely different reason. And almost none belonging to you.”

The room tilted.

Lottie gripped the edge of the table. “That’s not possible.”

“It is possible,” Reyes said, “if you weren’t in the car at all.”

Silence stretched between them, thick and heavy.

She could feel the confession Geoffrey had forced into her mouth starting to rot. Every word tasted like ash. The detective’s kindness was worse than shouting would have been. Kindness made her want to collapse. Kindness made her want to sob the truth across the table and beg someone anyone to believe that she had only ever tried to love a man who never loved her back.

“I was driving,” she whispered.

Reyes sat back. For the first time his expression hardened. “Then explain this.”

He slid a photograph across the table.

Lottie looked down.

It was a still from a traffic camera. Timestamp 11:09 p.m. The Smith family Mercedes, black and sleek, moving through an intersection two miles from the crash site. The driver’s side window was partially down. The face behind the wheel was sharp, unmistakable, and male.

Geoffrey.

Her heart stopped.

Reyes spoke quietly. “That camera is on a timer. It takes a frame every four seconds. We have seven clear shots of your husband’s face. We have the GPS data from the car itself. And we have a witness who saw a man matching his description arguing with the victim twenty minutes before she was killed.”

Lottie’s vision tunneled. The photograph swam.

“I… I must have been in the passenger seat,” she said, the words tasting like poison. “I don’t remember. I blacked out. I...”

“Stop.” Reyes’s voice was no longer gentle. “You’re digging yourself a hole you will never climb out of. Right now the evidence points to your husband. If you keep claiming responsibility, the only thing that happens is that a man who may have killed someone walks free, and you spend the next fifteen years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. Is that what you want?”

Tears burned at the corners of her eyes. She blinked them back hard.

“I was driving,” she repeated, because the alternative was watching Geoffrey’s world burn and somewhere deep inside the broken part of her still believed that if she burned instead, he might finally love her for it.

Reyes stared at her for a long moment. Then he stood, walked to the door, and opened it.