Unreliable Witness by Alana Terry

Author:Alana Terry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firstfruits Publishing

CHAPTER 19

The knife was in my hand. The life was draining out of Dennis’s eyes.

“You know you’ll pay for this,” he hissed. Even as death stood by waiting to escort him to judgment, your father tried to terrorize me. “Those insurance policies weren’t just for the girl. You know how bad this will look.”

I didn’t know how bad it would look. How could I? How could I have guessed that just like he made preparations so that my death would look like a suicide, he also made contingencies so that I’d be the primary suspect if he ended up dead?

Which is exactly what happened.

It wasn’t just the new insurance policies, although those certainly didn’t help my case.

There were the forged love letters from some anonymous boyfriend. The police found them stashed away behind the liquor cabinet. They immediately began to suspect I was having an affair, even though they never found out who the mysterious man was.

Because there was no other man, Justine.

No other man at all.

Then there was Dennis’s journal, which he only kept at work. He’d written in it for over a year, notes about how worried he was about my health, how he kept trying to protect me but was afraid I might one day hurt our daughter. He made up imaginary scenarios about coming home and finding you with bruises on your body, bruises I couldn’t adequately explain. The au pair wasn’t mentioned at all. I imagine if the police ever found his journal, Dennis didn’t want them trying to find her for questioning or digging too deep into her disappearance.

Of course, Dennis had been carrying on with multiple affairs. I wasn’t surprised, but his journal spelled out how I’d discovered love notes from his girlfriend two nights before he died. How mad I’d gotten. How I’d threatened to kill him and our daughter both because I was so angry.

The doctors who testified at trial didn’t help my case, either. It didn’t matter that for every single office visit, Dennis had gone in with me, planted firmly by my side like the all-loving husband. Had told me what kind of symptoms to claim I had. Often, he injected me with something before I met with the physicians. I still don’t know what it was, but there were times I couldn’t even remember the appointments after I got home.

In the end, the prosecutors didn’t need anything else. I was a woman, a minority, a gold-digging trophy bride with a boyfriend on the side, a history of insanity, and a well-documented diagnosis of post-partum psychosis which made me dangerous to my daughter.

I knew I didn’t stand a chance at the trial.

I was right.

They even tried to blame me for the cut you got on your leg while your father and I were struggling with the knife. It didn’t help that I couldn’t tell them how you got hurt, if the knife was in my hand or your father’s at the time. You know how it ended. First-degree assault and child abuse for your injury.

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