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My name is Wren Halloway. I'd been engaged to Desmond Ashcombe for fourteen months, a wedding planned for the following Saturday at a venue his family had used for three generations. I'd believed, right up until six days earlier, that I understood exactly what kind of life I was walking into.
I asked the nurse for one thing once she returned to check my vitals: a pen and paper, and privacy.
I wrote down everything I remembered — the timeline of the attack itself, fragmentary but real, and everything I'd just overheard, word for word, while it was still fresh enough to be exact.
Then I asked her to call Detective Priya Anand, the investigator assigned to my case, and to tell no one — not my family, not Desmond, not anyone from the venue or the wedding party — that I was fully conscious and lucid.
"I need you to understand something," I told Detective Anand, once she arrived. "I don't think this was a random attack. I think my fiancé paid for it."
She didn't dismiss me. She'd already found inconsistencies in Desmond's own statement — the timeline of his whereabouts that evening didn't fully align with what security cameras at his office building actually showed.
"Tell me everything you just heard," she said, and I did.
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