Chapter 3 - The First Lie
The phone rang three times before Laura picked up.
“Hello?” she answered, her voice completely normal, tinged with a hint of annoyance at the late hour.
Daniel closed his eyes, leaning his heavy head against the cold hospital wall.
“Where’s Mom, Laura?”
“Here at the house, sleeping,” she answered immediately.
Her lie was so smooth. So practiced.
Daniel looked through the small glass window of the emergency room doors, watching the nurses hook up IV bags to his mother’s frail arms.
He tightened his jaw so hard his teeth ached.
“That’s funny,” Daniel said, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. “Because I just pulled her out of a drainage pit at the old quarry. And she’s almost dead.”
Over the phone, there were no screams of shock.
There were no sudden gasps.
There were no frantic questions asking if she was okay.
There were no excuses.
Only silence.
A silence so long, so profound, that Daniel realized the worst part of this nightmare had not even arrived yet.
The silence was the sound of guilt.
Laura needed several heavy, suffocating seconds before she answered.
When she finally spoke, her voice was trembling, the confident facade entirely shattered.
“Daniel, I swear... I swear I didn’t know she was there.”
Daniel squeezed the phone, his knuckles turning white.
“Then tell me where you believed she was, Laura. Tell me where our mother was for the last three days while you were buying new couches.”
She began to cry. A pathetic, whimpering sound.
She said her husband, Brian, had taken Mrs. Helen back to the village on Sunday night.
According to Laura, the old woman kept insisting on sleeping in her own home, refusing to stay in Lexington.
She claimed Brian had driven her back and dropped her off near the bus station because he was in a hurry.
“And for three days...” Daniel asked, his voice shaking with a rage he had never felt before, “for three whole days, it never crossed your mind to call her? To check if she made it inside safely?”
Laura said nothing.
Her weeping just continued.
That silence was her first confession.
Because abandoning someone does not always mean physically throwing them into a pit.
Sometimes, it simply means choosing to believe their absence is easier than their presence.
It means turning a blind eye when it benefits you.
May you like
Daniel hung up the phone.
He didn’t want to hear another word. He needed his younger brother.
