Chapter 3 - Twenty Missing Minutes
After the fight, two officers entered the ballroom.
Vanessa immediately changed.
Her arrogance vanished.
Her voice trembled.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“He attacked me!”
Ethan almost laughed from disbelief.
“You dragged a four-year-old across the floor.”
“I was trying to stop him from running outside.”
“That’s a lie!”
One of Vanessa’s bodyguards groaned from beneath the broken floral display.
Vanessa pointed at Ethan.
“He assaulted three people.”
A few guests began speaking at once.
“I saw the child—”
“She had some kind of chain—”
“That man was protecting his son—”
Then the mansion’s security director stepped forward.
“We have cameras everywhere.”
Vanessa froze.
Only for half a second.
But Ethan saw it.
“Good,” Ethan said. “Show them.”
The security director returned ten minutes later looking pale.
“The ballroom system stopped recording at 8:41.”
Ethan checked his watch.
The fight had happened at 8:53.
Vanessa lowered her eyes.
“How convenient,” Ethan said.
The officers separated everyone.
Ethan wasn’t arrested that night because multiple witnesses confirmed Vanessa had physically mistreated the child first.
But Vanessa insisted on pressing charges over the assault.
Then Ethan discovered something even stranger.
He asked Ethan Jr. how Vanessa had gotten him away from the children’s room.
“She said you wanted me.”
“She said I wanted you?”
The boy nodded.
“Then the two men took me downstairs.”
“The bodyguards?”
Another nod.
“What happened next?”
Ethan Jr.’s lip trembled.
“Aunt Vanessa said I had to cry really loud.”
Ethan felt his stomach tighten.
“What else did she say?”
The child wiped his eyes.
“She said if you loved me, you would hit her.”
Ethan stopped breathing.
Across the ballroom, Vanessa was speaking calmly with an officer.
This had never been spontaneous cruelty.
She had wanted Ethan to see it.
May you like
She had wanted him furious.
And she had specifically told the child what Ethan was supposed to do next.
