I ABANDONED MY WIFE FOR FOUR DAYS TO SPOIL MY MISTRESS—AND BY THE TIME I RETURNED, MY WIFE HAD NEARLY DIED ALONE IN THE SNOW

I sat alone at the desk for another hour, listening to the hum of the city traffic below.

Finally, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a small pair of brass scissors, and cut open the top seal of the plastic evidence bag.

I pulled out Clara’s phone. The aluminum casing was warped, the glass screen fractured into a spiderweb of white lines, but the internal memory card remained intact. I connected the device to my high-speed diagnostic drive, routing the local media storage through my laptop.

A progress bar appeared on the screen:

EXTRACTING LOCAL MEDIA FILES... 100% COMPLETE.

A folder opened on my desktop. There were only two video files stored in the device's internal memory.

The first was the eleven-minute, forty-three-second file titled “For Ethan.mp4”—the video she had recorded inside the collapsed cabin, the one that had auto-synced to our cloud account when Search and Rescue found her backpack.

The second file sat beneath it.

It was recorded forty-eight hours later, inside the unheated concrete maintenance bunker, just three hours before the rescue team broke through the door.

Title: “UNTITLED_LOG_002.mp4”

Duration: 02 minutes, 14 seconds.

I stared at the thumbnail image. It was a dark, shadowy frame showing Clara’s face lit only by the red emergency flare she had cracked open to stay warm. Her lips were blue, her eyes wide and glassy with extreme hypothermia.

Please... don't let him see that one.

Her plea to the rescue officer echoed in my ears. She hadn't wanted me to see this. She had fought with her last remaining strength to keep this final recording from my eyes.

My hand hovered over the trackpad. My chest felt like it was being crushed under a hydraulic press. I knew that opening this file meant crossing a line from which I could never return—that whatever lay inside those two minutes and fourteen seconds would permanently shatter whatever remained of my soul.