Chapter 2 - The Footage on the Hidden Cloud
“Look at what your precious wife did while you were away!”My hands trembled as I logged into our family cloud account from the hospital waiting room. Emily’s phone had been seized by police as evidence, but our photos and videos synced automatically.
I scrolled past the newborn photos—Noah smiling in his sleep, Emily looking radiant despite her exhaustion—until I reached the timestamp from the text message: Yesterday, 3:14 AM.
It was a sixteen-minute video file. I pressed play and plugged in my headphones.
The screen was dark at first, lit only by the faint glow of the nightlight in our bedroom. Emily’s faint, rasping breaths filled the audio. Then, the bedroom door creaked open.
My sister Ashley walked in, holding a baby bottle. But she wasn't feeding Noah. She was pouring the milk into a plastic bucket on the floor.
"Please..." Emily’s voice was barely a whisper in the recording, her camera trembling as she held her phone beneath the blanket, secretly recording. "Ashley... please, give him the milk. He’s starving. I can’t get up... my legs won’t move..."
Ashley leaned over the bed, her face twisted in a cruel sneer. "Shut up, Emily. You think you're so smart, coming into our family, changing Ethan, making him move out of Mom's house? Mom gave up her entire life for him, and you stole him."
"I didn't..." Emily sobbed, gasping for air. "Please... he's just a baby..."
Then my mother entered the frame. She walked over to the nightstand, grabbed Emily’s prescription painkillers—the ones prescribed after her difficult labor—and shoved the entire bottle into her purse.
"You're going to sleep now, Emily," my mother said, her voice terrifyingly calm. "And when Ethan comes home to find a dead baby and a ruined wife, he'll realize that the only people who truly love him are his mother and sister. He'll come back home to us. Where he belongs."
"You're crazy..." Emily wheezed.
"No, my dear," Mom whispered, bending down right next to Emily’s ear. "I’m a mother protecting her investment."
The video ended.
I sat in the cold hospital chair, tears burning my eyes, rage suffocating my throat. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't laziness. It was a deliberate, psychopathic attempt to murder my wife and child so my mother could regain control over my life and my finances.
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Just then, Dr. Vance walked out of the Intensive Care Unit. Her face was grave.
"Mr. Miller," she said quietly. "Your wife has woken up. But she's asking for someone named Richard. And she claims... she claims Noah isn't your son."
