Part 1: Left to Freeze
I didn’t find out what took place at my own funeral until much later. While friends and relatives gathered to grieve for both me and my unborn child, my husband, Michael Carter, reportedly showed hardly any sorrow at all, and the words he spoke about me afterward stayed etched in my memory.
“They both froze to death. That useless woman finally got what she deserved.”
Just a few hours before I was presumed dead, Michael and I had been standing beside a frozen cliff in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. What was meant to be a private getaway had turned into yet another bitter quarrel, and as the wind ripped across the mountain, I begged him again and again to stop fighting with me and just take me home.
“Michael, please. I don’t want to argue anymore. Let’s just go home.”
Instead of cooling off, he stepped closer and pushed me dangerously near the edge. Before I could grasp what he meant to do, he shoved me, and all at once there was nothing under my feet but the steep mountainside and the endless white expanse below.
I clawed for branches, rocks, anything that might break my fall, but my hands closed around nothing. When I finally managed to glance upward, I saw Michael standing at the top of the cliff, watching me with an unsettling calm instead of reaching out to help.
“Don’t worry. Neither you nor the baby will suffer long.”
I eventually slammed onto a narrow ledge halfway down the cliff, and pain tore through my body the instant I landed. My ribs and wrist were badly hurt, but even with everything aching, my first instinct was to wrap both arms around my pregnant stomach and shield my unborn son.
“Please stay with me. Please don’t leave me.”
Snow started piling over my clothes as the blizzard grew fiercer, and the cold slowly drained the strength from my limbs. I stopped wondering whether I would survive, because every last bit of energy I had was fixed on the faint movements beneath my hands, proof that my baby was still fighting beside me.
Then voices drifted down from above. Michael hadn’t left after all, and when I listened harder, I realized he was no longer alone. Ashley, the woman everyone knew as his executive assistant, had joined him at the edge.
“Is she dead?”
Michael answered with a quiet laugh.
“For fifty million dollars… she better be.”
Those words changed everything. The isolated mountain trip, Michael’s odd behavior, and the enormous life insurance policy suddenly clicked together, and I understood that my fall had never been a spur-of-the-moment act in the heat of an argument. He had planned for both me and our unborn child to disappear.
“Let’s go back. I’m freezing.”
Ashley and Michael walked off without even checking whether I was still alive. For nearly two hours I lay trapped beneath the falling snow, forcing myself to stay conscious whenever exhaustion tried to drag me under, while the occasional stirring of my baby gave me one reason to keep fighting.
At last, the distant thrum of helicopter blades cut through the storm, followed by a powerful searchlight sweeping across the mountainside. A black helicopter hovered above the cliff, and moments later a rescuer came down toward my ledge on a cable.
When the man reached me and pulled off his goggles, I froze for a completely different reason. His silver hair and blue eyes belonged to a face I knew from an old photograph my mother had hidden years ago, and as he gently touched my frozen cheek, he looked at me as though he had spent a lifetime searching for this moment.
“Emma… I finally found you.”
* * *
Richard lingered in the doorway of my hospital room, the color draining from his face as he spotted the torn letter in my hand. I held it out toward him and studied his expression closely, already sensing that the missing final page held something he had deliberately kept from me.
“Who removed the last page?”
He looked at the letter, then back at me, and said nothing. His silence hurt more than any excuse could have, because after everything I had survived, Richard had promised there would be no more secrets between us.
“You promised me. No more secrets.”
He stepped closer and tried to speak.
“Emma—”
“No. Don’t say my name like it can fix what you did. Ashley called me. She said the letter wasn’t complete, and she told me to ask you about the baby at Vale Harbor.”
Richard shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, the composure he usually wore had cracked. He sat on the edge of my hospital bed, laced his fingers together, and finally admitted that my mother had not been the only pregnant woman tied to Vale Harbor.
“Her name was Elise Morgan. She worked in the estate archives. Quiet, careful, brilliant with details.”
“And the baby?”
His hesitation told me at once there was more.
“Richard.”
“The child disappeared the night of the fire.”
