Chapter 1 - THE CAMERA ABOVE THE DOOR
My father had a fistful of my hair when my water broke on the driveway.
I was eight months pregnant, barefoot, wearing the same deep-blue maternity dress I had worn to Ethan’s memorial luncheon three days earlier.
Richard Hale dragged me across the wet stone as though I were a bag he had decided no longer belonged inside the house.
“Sign over the house,” he shouted, “or crawl off my property.”
It wasn’t his property.
That was the part he needed me too frightened to remember.
My overnight bag had already fallen from the front steps. My handbag lay near the flower bed where Richard had thrown it.
And beside the open glass door stood Brianna.
Twenty-four years old.
My father’s wife of fourteen months.
My stepmother, technically.
She was holding her phone vertically and laughing.
“Keep going,” she told him. “She looks insane.”
A contraction tightened across my stomach.
I gasped and twisted onto one hip, wrapping an arm around my belly.
Richard kept pulling.
Then warmth spread beneath my dress.
For one awful second I thought I was bleeding.
I looked down.
My water had broken.
Richard released my hair as if my body had become disgusting.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
That was my father’s response.
Not Are you okay?
Not The baby.
Just irritation.
Brianna came down one step, still filming.
“Ethan chose badly,” she said. “Even that baby can’t save you now.”
I reached for my handbag.
She kicked it farther across the wet pavement.
Something inside me went quiet.
Not calm.
Something beyond panic.
Three weeks before Ethan died, he had made me memorize one sentence.
I had laughed at him then.
Now I crawled toward the bag.
Richard grabbed my shoulder.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I knocked his hand away.
Inside the handbag, beneath tissues and prenatal vitamins, was the old backup phone Ethan insisted I keep charged.
Richard saw it too late.
I pressed the only saved contact.
Naomi Brooks answered on the first ring.
“Hannah?”
A second contraction bent me forward.
I kept my eyes on my father.
“Naomi… activate Protocol June.”
Richard froze.
Not because he knew everything the phrase meant.
Because he knew Ethan had used the word June around him once before.
Naomi’s voice became completely businesslike.
“Already moving. Stay where Ethan’s camera can see you.”
I looked up.
Above the glass entrance, beneath the white soffit, the security camera’s status light was active.
Brianna slowly lowered her phone.
Richard followed my gaze.
His face changed.
Then he lunged for my backup phone.
I pulled it against my chest.
“You think a camera matters?” he shouted.
I looked at him.
“No.”
Another contraction seized me.
“What you said before you noticed it matters.”
May you like
For the first time since Ethan died, my father looked less like a man taking control of a grieving daughter’s life.
He looked like a man who had just realized the dead person he’d been trying to outmaneuver had prepared for him while he was still alive.
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