Chapter 4 - The Agonizing Silence|
Natalie answered on the third ring. Her voice was light, cheerful, accompanied by the background rustle of office papers.
“Hey, Dan! What’s up? Is little Oliver awake yet?”
Hearing her ordinary, casual tone almost broke my resolve. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words caught like dry dust in my throat. How could I articulate the horror currently taking place inside my own home?
“Dan? You there?” Natalie asked, her tone shifting slightly, detecting my strange silence. “Is everything okay with Emma?”
“I... I can't explain it right now, Nat,” I rasped, my voice shaking so badly I barely recognized it. “I’m sending a video clip to your phone. I need you to watch it right now. Stay on the line.”
“What kind of video?”
“Just watch it. Please.”
I minimized the call, selected the three-minute clip of Vivian forcing Emma onto her knees, and tapped send over an encrypted message thread.
A few seconds passed. I heard the soft chime of Natalie’s phone receiving the file on the other end of the line.
Then came the silence.
It wasn't a short, surprised pause. It was a heavy, suffocating silence that stretched out for ten seconds, twenty seconds, forty-five seconds. The background noise in Natalie’s office seemed to vanish completely.
I held the phone tight against my ear, listening to the agonizing quiet.
“Nat?” I whispered, my heart pounding. “Are you still there?”
Instead of an answer, I heard a ragged, broken gasp.
It was a sound I had never heard my strong, fiercely independent sister make in her entire thirty-two years of life. It wasn't the shocked cry of someone seeing something surprising. It was the horrific, guttural sob of a person whose oldest, deepest wound had just been violently ripped open.
“Natalie... please talk to me,” I begged, pulling the phone closer. “What’s wrong?”
She took a long, trembling breath that sounded like sharp glass pulling through her lungs.
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When she finally spoke, her voice dropped to a hollow, terrifying whisper that changed everything I thought I knew about my family.
“She used to do this to me.”
