I didn’t wait for a reply. I walked briskly down the hall and into the master bedroom. My tote bag was lying exactly where I’d left it, on the edge of the bed. I grabbed it, unzipped the main compartment, and plunged my hand inside. My fingers brushed against the familiar leather of my wallet and the stiff edge of my passport. Thank goodness.
I closed the bag and turned to leave.
Ryan was standing in the doorway.
He completely blocked the exit. His cheerful, childlike demeanor was gone. His face was blank, his eyes hooded and dark. He was staring at my hands.
“You’re trembling, Maya,” he said. His voice was no longer warm. It was a low, flat baritone.
“Just… wedding jitters, I guess. And the excitement of the trip,” I stammered, clutching the tote bag to my chest. “Let’s go, Ryan. We’re going to be late.”
I moved forward, trying to get past him.
His large hand shot out with terrifying speed, gripping my wrist like a steel vise. The hold was excruciatingly painful, instantly bruising my skin. I gasped as I dropped the tote bag.
“You didn’t go to the wedding shop,” Ryan said, coming into the room and supporting me against the wall. “Diane checked the shared credit card statement. You didn’t drive to the shop. You drove downtown. To the city hall.”
Behind him, in the corridor, I heard the distinct, dull thud of the deadbolt of the front door engaging. Diane had locked us in.
She appeared in the doorway behind Ryan. The maternal mask was gone. In its place was a hard, cold, and deeply cynical woman. She looked at me not with a mother’s love, but with the calculating gaze of an exterminator eyeing a trapped rat.
“I told you, Ryan,” Diane said, her voice dripping with condescension. “I told you the fake Nevada dissolution document was botched. I told you the county registry would flag it in the last digital scan.”
“Shut up, Diane,” Ryan snapped, his eyes never leaving mine. He squeezed my wrist tighter. I moaned in pain. “Who did you talk to, Maya? What exactly did they say?”
There was no point in lying anymore. The play was over. The curtain had fallen.
“They told me everything,” I spat, anger finally burning away the terror. I stared at him, then at the woman behind him. “I know about bigamy. I know she’s your wife. I know you’re a sick, twisted pair of crooks.”
Harris rushed towards me. I was leaning against the wall, rubbing my bruised throat, shaking violently as the adrenaline began to leave my system.
“Maya, are you okay? Did he hurt you?” Harris asked, his eyes scanning my neck.
“I’m fine,” he croaked, his voice hoarse. I watched the two monsters writhe on my bedroom floor. “I’m fine.”
Ryan was crying. Real tears this time. “It’s a misunderstanding!” he cried, pepper spray smearing his face. “She attacked us! She’s gone crazy!”
I walked slowly toward where Ryan was kneeling, flanked by two armed police officers. I looked at the man I thought was the love of my life. Stripped of his charming smile, blinded and huddled, he looked pathetic. Small. Weak.
“You are under arrest for assault, battery and attempted murder,” Harris told him, reading him his rights.
“And marital fraud,” I added, my cold, harsh voice echoing in the ruined room. “And conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.”
Diane, struggling against the officer who was holding her down, looked at me with pure, venomous hatred. “You’ve got nothing, you little brat! It’s her word against yours!”
“I registered with the county registry office,” I said, looking at her. “I have the fake Nevada dissolution papers you tried to file. And most importantly, Diane…”
I knelt down to be at Ryan’s eye level. He flinched, trying to turn his burning face away from my voice.
“You thought you were so clever,” I whispered to him. “You thought you had it all figured out. Two million dollars, before taxes. But you made a massive and fatal mistake in your greedy little scheme.”
Ryan stopped whining for a second, his chest rising and falling. “What…”
“A life insurance policy taken out under fraudulent pretexts is null and void,” I said, savoring the look of burgeoning awareness and utter despair that flooded his red, swollen face. “Even if you had killed me in Bali. Even if you had gotten away with murder. The insurance company conducts a thorough background check before paying out on policies worth over a million dollars. They would have found the bigamy. They would have voided the policy. You would have killed me for nothing. You wouldn’t have gotten a single cent.”
Ryan let out a hollow, anguished sound — a groan of total and catastrophic defeat.
“Get this garbage out of my house,” I told the police officers, standing up and turning my back on them.
Chapter 6: A blank slate
It took six months for the dust to settle.
The trial was a media spectacle. It turned out I wasn’t the first. Ryan and Diane—the “mother-son black widows,” as they were dubbed on true-crime podcasts—had run similar scams in three different states over the past decade. They targeted single, successful women, drained their accounts, and vanished. I was just the first they started trying to kill to collect a huge life insurance payout.
