Harrison's Doubt
Chapter 08 - Harrison's Doubt
Harrison moved through the following week in a specific, exhausting fog, maintaining his careful performance of normalcy at home while every conversation with Priya or Detective Delgado deepened his certainty that the woman sharing his bed each night had likely orchestrated his wife's death.
"I don't know how to keep pretending everything's fine," he admitted to Carla, during one of his evening visits to see Chloe. "Every dinner, every ordinary conversation, I'm sitting across from someone I now believe might have killed Elise, and I have to smile and ask about her day like nothing's wrong."
"You're protecting Chloe," Carla said. "That's why you're doing it. Keep that in front of your mind every single time it gets unbearable."
"What if the investigation doesn't find enough proof," Harrison asked. "What if all of this suspicion, all of this evidence, never actually amounts to something a court can act on."
"Then we find another way to protect you both," Carla said firmly. "But let's not assume failure before Priya and the detective have finished their work. You said yourself the case is developing quickly."
Harrison nodded, though the specific uncertainty continued gnawing at him, a man caught between grief for a wife he now believed had been murdered, and a carefully maintained calm toward the woman he suspected of doing it.
He found himself, during quiet moments, replaying the entire year of his marriage to Meredith with an entirely new, suspicious lens, every small kindness now carrying a question underneath it he'd never once thought to ask before.
Had she genuinely cared for him, or had every gesture been part of a calculated performance, designed specifically to secure the exact life she'd apparently wanted badly enough to remove his wife permanently in order to claim it.
"I keep trying to find some version of this where she's actually innocent," he told Carla. "Some explanation that doesn't require believing the woman I married is capable of murder."
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"I understand wanting that," Carla said gently. "I think you need to let the evidence lead you, though, rather than your own hope for a simpler, less devastating explanation."
Harrison nodded, understanding the wisdom in that, though the specific grief of confronting his own potential naivety, having married a woman capable of something this monstrous without ever once suspecting it, sat heavy in his chest regardless.
