After the press conference, I went back to The Caldwell Estate with my mother-in-law.
That night, Colin came.
He’d lost weight. His face looked terrible.
But I didn’t go out.
In the yard, she stood inside the door, looking at him.
“She won’t see you.”
He lowered his head, voice hoarse. “I know I was wrong.”
She sighed. “If you’d known then, you wouldn’t have done it. Go. From now on, I don’t have a son like you.”
Colin had nothing to say.
Finally, he left the things at the door and walked away.
I watched his back through the window, my fingers tightening on the curtain. I didn’t go after him.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
The hallway light stayed on.
She sat outside reading the paper. When I pushed the door open, she looked up.
“Can’t sleep?”
I nodded and sat across from her.
After a long time, I asked quietly, “When Dad died — did you really not feel anything?”
Her hands paused.
After a while, she spoke.
“It’s not that I didn’t feel anything. I just didn’t cry.”
She closed the folder. Her voice was flat.
“After the accident, a lot of people called me cold. Someone asked in front of Colin whether I’d been waiting for him to die.”
“The truth is, I couldn’t sleep for nights.”
“I kept thinking about those twenty minutes before the crash. If I’d made one more phone call, would things have been different?”
“But when they wanted me to express grief, I couldn’t.”
“The more I said, the more wrong it sounded.”
“So I just said one word. Simpler.”
I stared at her.
She didn’t look away. “On your wedding day, when you raised your glass to me, it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy.”
“I had the hotel equipment checked beforehand. Reset the permissions.”
“I was afraid something would happen.”
“But I didn’t know how to say it in a way that sounded happy.”
My nose stung.
All these years, everyone thought she was cold. Heartless.
But the one who actually protected me was her.
I stood and hugged her.
Her body went stiff. Her hand hovered in the air. After a few seconds, she patted my back gently.
“Don’t cry.”
“We have to go out tomorrow.”
*****
The next day, I went to cooperate with the investigation.
When the investigators asked about the initial installation and permission management, Colin finally stopped dodging.
He admitted on the spot that the family account had always been under his management.
Before we got married, he’d given Vivian access to my phone backups.
After we got married, he’d also let Vivian remotely check the devices at home without my knowledge.
I sat listening. My chest felt tight.
That afternoon, he publicly admitted that he was responsible.
The company suspended him quickly.
Not long after, Vivian released new material.
She used clipped chat logs to suggest Colin hadn’t just been careless — he’d been enabling her to do things to me since before the wedding.
She even started pulling him into what happened after.
The narrative flipped again.
This time, Colin was the one being publicly judged across the trending topics.
I looked at the headlines. Said nothing.
Only now was he tasting what I’d been through.
*****