What Chloe Remembered
Chapter 07 - What Chloe Remembered
Chloe, still staying with Aunt Carla, mentioned something during a quiet evening conversation that Harrison found himself replaying long after he'd hung up the phone that night.
"Mom seemed sad a lot, that last summer," Chloe told her father, during their nightly call. "I remember her crying once, when she thought I was asleep. She was on the phone, saying something like, 'You need to leave us alone. I mean it this time.'"
Harrison felt his chest tighten. "Do you remember who she was talking to."
"No," Chloe admitted. "I just remember she sounded scared. Not sad-scared. Actually scared, like when you think someone's going to hurt you."
Harrison relayed this detail to Detective Delgado the following morning, understanding its potential significance immediately.
"That's consistent with someone experiencing sustained harassment or threats before their death," Delgado said. "I want to pull Elise's phone records from that final summer, if the carrier retained them long enough. Sometimes these things surface in patterns nobody thought to look for at the time."
The phone records, once obtained through a formal request, revealed a pattern of calls from an unregistered number, increasing in frequency over the final two months of Elise's life, calls that Elise had apparently never reported to anyone, not her husband, not the police, carrying whatever fear those calls caused entirely alone.
"Someone was harassing her," Harrison said, reading the call log Delgado shared with him. "For months. And I had no idea."
"People often hide exactly this kind of fear from the people they love most," Delgado said gently, "particularly if they're trying to protect their family from a threat they believe they can handle alone. I don't think you should carry guilt for not seeing something she deliberately kept hidden from you."
Harrison sat with that reassurance, though the specific guilt lingered regardless, a husband who had believed, for two years, that he'd simply lost his wife to a tragic accident, only now understanding she may have spent her final months living in genuine, unaddressed fear.
"Can you trace the unregistered number," he asked.
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"We're working on it," Delgado said. "These things take time, particularly with an untraceable prepaid phone. I want you prepared for the possibility that we may never conclusively prove who made those calls, even if we're both fairly confident about who we suspect."
Harrison nodded, understanding the frustrating limits of what the investigation might actually be able to prove, though his own growing certainty about Meredith's involvement only deepened with every new piece of evidence Priya and Delgado uncovered together.
