Chapter 4 - HOW THEY PLANNED THE FINALE
The final Friday began wrong before either of them came upstairs.
My son had been restless since dawn, kicking high beneath my ribs and then going strangely quiet in stretches long enough to frighten me. I drank from the water bottle I rationed myself, counted movements, and tried not to panic. At noon, I heard Marlene downstairs on the phone using her church voice. She said, “Yes, after the appointment next week everything will be simpler. Darren and I just need one last difficult night with her.” One last difficult night. The words kept moving in circles through my mind.
When she came upstairs that evening, she was dressed as if for guests. Lipstick. Pressed navy dress. Pearls at her throat. Darren followed with his phone already live, smiling that loose lazy smile he wore when he thought the ending belonged to him. “Tonight is the finale,” he said. Marlene rolled the sealed feeding syringe between her fingers and leaned close enough for me to smell her perfume. “After this,” she whispered, “nobody will believe a word you say.”
For seven months I had learned how to keep my eyes down.
That night, I lifted them and looked directly into Darren’s phone.
“Then let them hear all of it,” I said.
He laughed. Marlene smiled, amused by what she mistook for desperation. But inside, something had shifted in me over the past week. Paula had sent one reply the night before—just three words, arriving in the thin crack of signal near midnight.
Still getting them.
No promise. No plan. But enough to know the uploads had not vanished into nothing.
I kept one hand over my belly, not to hide my son, but to remind myself why I could not break while they were watching for exactly that. Marlene reached for my jaw. Darren adjusted the camera. And then the baby monitor on the dresser crackled.
A woman’s voice came through the speaker from downstairs, sharp and steady.
“Elena? Keep him talking.”
Everything stopped.
Marlene froze with one hand on the tube. Darren’s smile vanished so quickly it looked like someone had wiped it off his face. For half a second none of us moved. Then Darren lunged toward the dresser, grabbing at the monitor as if he could strangle the voice with his hands. I slid the hidden phone behind my back on instinct. The upload light still glowed through a crack in the case.
He saw it.
Not the device itself at first. The light.
May you like
His head snapped toward me. Then he looked at his own phone screen and whatever he saw there drained the color from him. Maybe it was the flood of comments. Maybe one of the viewers had recognized the house, or the room, or Marlene’s pearls, or Paula’s name in a message she had forced onto whatever platform they were using. Maybe the livestream was no longer private. I still don’t know. What I remember is Darren whispering my name like it was a threat and a prayer at once.
“Elena?”
