The investigation that followed moved with a speed and discretion that surprised even me. Detective Anand traced the name Priscilla to Priscilla Vane, a woman Desmond had, according to phone records subpoenaed within the week, been in near-daily contact with for the past eight months — calls and messages carefully deleted from his primary phone, but recoverable from cloud backups his own carrier still retained.
What emerged, piece by piece, was considerably more calculated than a simple affair.
Desmond and Priscilla had, in fact, planned to marry themselves — quietly, in another state, using a marriage license he'd applied for under circumstances that required proof he wasn't already engaged to be married that same week. My hospitalization, and the assumption that I'd be too injured, too traumatized, or too unidentifiable to immediately contest anything, had apparently been part of a timeline that let him proceed with both his public wedding to me canceled "due to the tragedy" and a quiet legal marriage to Priscilla immediately after.
He hadn't wanted to simply call off our engagement. Ending it outright would have required explaining, to his family and considerable social circle, exactly why — and risking the reputational cost of publicly leaving me for another woman just days before our wedding.
An attack, framed as a random, tragic crime, solved that problem entirely. It made him the sympathetic, grieving fiancé instead of the man who'd abandoned his injured partner for someone else.
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