Don't Look Up
Chapter 02 - Don't Look Up
The paramedics arrived within twelve minutes, though Ethan would later remember it as considerably longer, every second stretched thin by the specific terror of watching his wife's hands shake uncontrollably against the marble floor.
"I'm okay," Sophie kept saying, voice unsteady. "I'm okay, Ethan, please, just don't go up there."
"Someone just tried to kill you," Ethan said. "I need to know who was on that balcony."
"I know who might have been," Sophie said, quieter now, glancing toward the staircase like the shadow might still be listening. "I don't know for certain. I only saw a hand. I only heard the withdrawal after."
The paramedics checked her over carefully, confirming no broken bones, a badly wrenched shoulder from the catch, bruising already forming along her ribs, but nothing that required hospitalization beyond careful observation overnight.
"You were lucky," one of them told Ethan quietly, out of Sophie's earshot. "A fall from that height without a proper catch, that's not survivable most of the time."
Ethan understood the specific weight of that sentence more than he wanted to. He'd caught his wife by less than a full second of timing, arriving at exactly the moment gravity would have made the outcome permanent otherwise.
His father's estate attorney, present at the gathering along with most of the extended family, insisted on calling the police immediately, a suggestion Ethan agreed with instantly and Sophie, surprisingly, resisted.
"Not yet," she said. "Please. If we call the police now, whoever did this will know we're looking, and the document I'm holding disappears before anyone official ever sees it."
"Sophie, someone just pushed you off a balcony," Ethan said. "That's not a decision we get to make quietly."
"I'm not saying never," Sophie said. "I'm saying let me explain what's in this folder first, before the house fills with officers and everyone starts performing shock and concern for an investigation instead of telling the truth to each other privately."
Ethan looked at the folder, still gripped tight in her hands even now, hours after the fall, refusing to let go of it even while paramedics checked her ribs.
"What's in it," he asked. "What's important enough that someone would try to kill you over it."
May you like
Sophie looked at him for a long moment, weighing exactly how much to say with extended family still milling nervously in the atrium below, any one of them potentially the shadow from the balcony.
"Your father's real will," she said quietly. "Not the one the estate attorney filed six months ago. The real one. And it doesn't say what everyone in this house currently believes it says."
