My Husband Says I Died Three Years Ago
A TaleDale Story · Story concept by Nora Ashwick
Gabriel locked the apartment door behind him.
Julian stepped in front of me. Gabriel gave a humorless smile and placed the gun on the floor.
“If I came to kill her, I would not bring the one weapon she can identify.”
“You sedated me six times,” I said.
“You suffered seizures six times. Sedation stopped them.”
“You used a false name.”
“Dr. Bell is the name on my current license. Gabriel Wynn officially died in the Aveline clinic fire.”
Celeste spoke through the phone. “Gabriel?”
His composure broke for half a second.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
“Vivian is downstairs.”
“Leave now.”
“She has people at every door.”
The call disconnected.
Gabriel grabbed the phone, but Julian blocked him. “Explain the video.”
“Elena pushed me because Vivian was behind her. Falling was the only way out of the line of fire.”
“You put the gun in my hand,” I said.
“Your instruction.”
“Everyone keeps blaming my instructions.”
Gabriel pulled up his sleeve. A scar crossed his forearm. “You gave me exactly twenty seconds to decide whether to trust you. You said Vivian’s organization needed to believe you had tried to kill me. If I survived, I was to place the weapon in your hand and take you through the boathouse tunnel.”
“After my mother shot me?”
“The gun fired a blank. A blood pack beneath your blouse made the injury convincing.”
I remembered the brown stains on the scarf.
“The entire scene was staged.”
“Most of it.”
“What wasn’t?”
He looked toward the paused image of my mother.
“Vivian did not know the gun held blanks.”
The room went quiet.
My mother had pulled the trigger believing it would kill me.
“Why?”
“Because you discovered how the Vale Foundation was using patients from its recovery clinics.”
“Using them for what?”
“Identity laundering. Dead patients remained alive on paper. Living witnesses became dead. Assets moved with them. Celeste was not the first person given another face—only the first given yours.”
Gabriel opened the laptop’s hidden directory. It contained scanned admission forms from six Vale Foundation clinics. Beside certain patient names were new identities, death dates, and account numbers.
“Some patients were escaping violent families,” he said. “At first, Vivian’s program genuinely saved people. Then wealthy clients learned a clean death could erase debts, testimony, and criminal histories. The foundation began selling new lives.”
“And Anna Cross?”
“A real patient. She entered the Grayhaven clinic after a domestic assault. Six months later, Anna legally died under another name.”
“So I took hers.”
“With permission, according to the file.”
“Can I ask her?”
Gabriel looked away.
“Anna disappeared after meeting you at the lake house. No one has seen her since.”
Another missing woman. Another identity in my pocket. If Anna was dead, my second life had been built on her grave.
“Was she the material in the car?”
“No,” Gabriel said too quickly.
Julian heard it too.
“What was in the car?” he asked.
Gabriel closed the directory. “Enough human tissue to satisfy a careless laboratory and enough influence to discourage a careful one.”
“Whose?”
“I was never given a name.”
I stepped closer. “Were they alive when the material was taken?”
His silence lasted less than a second, but it changed the room.
“That was the question Elena intended to prove,” he said. “Before someone removed the evidence and her memory.”
I stared at the wall of photographs. Anna Cross was not simply a hiding place. She was an identity manufactured by the same system I had tried to expose.
“Why can’t I remember?”
“After the lake, I went with you through the tunnel in the escape vehicle. I was beside you while the driver took us toward the clinic. Before we reached the road, someone hit our vehicle. You suffered a head injury. You woke two days later with fragmented memory and refused to trust me. So I followed your contingency plan. I gave you Anna’s documents and let you disappear.”
“You let a brain-injured woman vanish?” Julian said.
“She held a gun on me.”
That sounded possible. The possibility sickened me.
Gabriel approached the laptop and advanced the video one frame at a time. “You missed this.”
After he placed the gun in my hand, my past self opened her eyes.
I had not been unconscious.
I looked directly at the camera and raised two fingers.
“A signal,” Gabriel said. “It meant the plan had entered its second phase.”
“What was phase two?”
He removed a sealed note from inside his coat.
“You never told me. You told me to give you this only after you watched the unedited recording.”
The envelope bore my handwriting and today’s date, written three years earlier.
I opened it.
Inside was a photograph of Julian asleep in our old bedroom. A red circle had been drawn around his head.
On the back, I had written:
THEY THINK JULIAN IS THE HOSTAGE. DO NOT TELL HIM HE IS THE TARGET.