Chapter 10 - ASHLEY WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE TOO
Ashley asked for another interview.
This time she brought an email she had previously concealed.
Michael sent it four days before the trip.
It contained instructions for Ashley to park on the eastern access road after “the confrontation.”
She was then supposed to follow Michael down another route because he did not want their vehicles photographed together.
Ashley initially interpreted it as affair secrecy.
Then investigators compared the route to winter closures.
The eastern access road had been closed by snow.
Michael knew.
His phone contained a downloaded park map showing the closure.
“Why send her there?” Emma asked.
Daniel did not answer.
Ashley did.
Through her attorney, she finally admitted that Michael had begun talking about a second accident.
Not directly.
After Emma was gone, he said Ashley would need to disappear from his life publicly for several months.
They could not be seen together immediately after his pregnant wife’s death.
He suggested Ashley drive separately through the mountains.
He repeatedly mentioned how dangerous the roads were.
Ashley believed he planned to abandon the affair temporarily.
Then, the morning of the cliff trip, she found a bottle of prescription sleep medication inside the drink Michael had packed for her.
The tablets belonged to Michael.
Ashley did not take the drink.
That was why she brought the beacon.
She finally understood the scale of his plan.
Emma was the insurance payout.
Ashley was the witness who knew too much.
Michael intended to create two tragedies close enough together to look like catastrophic coincidence—or at minimum to incapacitate Ashley long enough to control her account.
The revelation reinterpreted everything.
Ashley’s panic.
The hidden beacon.
Her refusal to stand close to Michael.
Her question about whether rescuers had recovered anything.
She had not been protecting only Emma when she triggered the signal.
She had been trying to save herself.
Emma read Ashley’s statement alone.
For weeks she had imagined Michael and Ashley standing beside her empty casket already planning a new life together.
That had never been Michael’s plan.
There was no future couple.
There was Michael.
Money.
And two women he had converted into problems.
Susan found Emma staring at the statement.
“Does this make Ashley less guilty?”
Emma shook her head.
“She helped him bring me there.”
“Yes.”
“She let him build the setup.”
“Yes.”
“She lied after he pushed me.”
“Yes.”
Emma looked at Grace.
“But she also saved us.”
Susan waited.
Emma’s eyes filled.
“I hate that both things are true.”
That became the most difficult fact of the entire case.
The woman who helped lure Emma to the mountain was also the reason a helicopter reached the mountain in time.
Ashley had betrayed her.
Ashley had saved her.
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Neither truth canceled the other.
And prosecutors now had the evidence they needed to move against Michael.
