Chapter 7 - THE FUNERAL BEFORE THE TRUTH
On the fourth day, the official river search was reduced.
No bodies had been recovered.
Silas announced that the family would hold a funeral with two ceremonial coffins.
Elena refused.
“They could still be alive.”
“The river was forty-three degrees,” Silas said.
“They were taken.”
“You need to stop saying that.”
“I saw you.”
He leaned close to her hospital bed.
“If you continue accusing me, I will have your doctors evaluate whether you are capable of making decisions.”
Elena stared at him.
“You planned this.”
Silas pressed the nurse-call button.
“My wife is becoming confused again.”
Elena knocked his hand away.
The nurse entered and found Silas standing calmly while Elena cried.
That image went into her chart.
Agitation.
Paranoia.
Emotional instability.
Samantha immediately arranged for an independent physician.
The second doctor concluded that Elena’s memories could not be dismissed simply because she had a concussion.
She was released into Samantha’s care.
Silas responded by giving an interview outside the Mercer estate.
He told reporters Elena had been driving too fast.
He said she had insisted on collecting the girls despite his warnings about the storm.
He asked the public to pray for a mother “struggling to accept her role in a terrible tragedy.”
The story spread everywhere.
Anonymous sources claimed Elena had been distracted by divorce negotiations.
Someone leaked that she had accused Silas of causing the crash.
Online comments called her unstable.
Some called her a murderer.
Elena stopped reading.
She spent each night in the girls’ bedroom.
Lily’s books remained stacked beside the bed.
Sophie’s paper animals covered the windowsill.
On the seventh night, Elena found a drawing tucked beneath Lily’s pillow.
It showed four people standing beneath a yellow sun.
Elena, Lily, Sophie, and Silas.
Margot had been drawn far away in black crayon.
Across the bottom, Lily had written:
I don’t like when Dad says Mom will be gone.
Elena called Samantha immediately.
Samantha photographed the drawing and placed it in an evidence sleeve.
“Did Lily ever tell you what he meant?”
“No.”
The next morning, Silas’s attorneys delivered papers requesting that Elena accept responsibility for negligent driving and temporarily surrender control of the girls’ trust.
The signing was scheduled for immediately after the funeral.
Silas had invited executives, board members, reporters, and several trust advisers to attend the service.
He did not only want Elena to grieve publicly.
He wanted witnesses to see her break.
Samantha advised her not to attend.
Elena looked at the two black dresses hanging in the closet.
“I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because if my daughters are alive, I will not let him bury them.”
At 2:14 a.m. on the morning of the funeral, Samantha’s phone sounded an alert.
Lily’s smartwatch had connected to a wireless network for six minutes.
An audio file began uploading.
May you like
So did a new location history.
👉 Hours before the funeral, the missing child’s watch finally spoke—and the first sound on the recording was Sophie calling for her mother.
