Scene 7 – The Ex-Spouse’s Reexamination

The interview room carried that stale chill that seeps into your bones, the kind that makes truth harder to tell. Nate sat across from Detective Gina Bauer, shoulders squared, one leg bouncing like a piston under the table. He wasn’t here to cooperate—he was here to defend himself.
“She said she was going to take a break from recording,” he began, before Gina could even open her file. “Said she was tired of pretending. I asked her what that meant, and she just said, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ I thought she was bluffing.”
He gave a dry laugh, the kind that covered more nerves than humor. The words “pretending” and “bluffing” hung in the air between them, heavy with irony. When Gina brought up the Sedona draft—the memoir the victim had started years ago, the one nobody was supposed to see—he didn’t deny it.
“She showed it to me once,” he admitted. “I told her it was a bad idea. That nobody needed to know that part of her past.”
He said it like a confession disguised as advice, but his tone carried something else—a warning. His jaw tightened, and for the first time, his eyes met hers in something close to anger.
“You’re trying to stir up trouble from ancient history,” he said. “That’s all this is. You people can’t leave anything alone.”
Gina let the silence stretch. The recorder on the table kept blinking red, steady and patient. He glanced at it, then looked away, pretending not to care.

Back at her desk later that night, Gina scrolled through the victim’s recovered calendar entries. One caught her eye:

Dinner w/ Nate – Thurs, 7PM. Talk about future.

The dinner never happened. According to the text history, he canceled that afternoon.

Nate: Let’s not do this. You’ve made your choices.

Three hours later, the victim’s phone stopped sending signals. Whatever future she wanted to discuss ended in that message thread.

The next piece came from her cloud drive—a scanned PDF labeled NDA_Nate_Draft_Unsigned.pdf. The file’s metadata dated back to late 2021. Gina opened it and skimmed the text. Legal jargon wrapped around control like barbed wire:

• No public discussion of the divorce.
• No mention of the Sedona trip.
• No interviews, no memoirs, no portrayals in a “damaging or professionally harmful light.”

Unsigned. Unacknowledged. But saved—maybe as proof that she never agreed to be silent.

The pieces formed a shape that Gina didn’t like. Nate had motive—fear of exposure, loss of control. He knew exactly what the Sedona story was and wanted it buried. She was ready to dig it back up. And that dinner—her attempt at confrontation—died before it began.
Gina stared at the file until the text blurred. Somewhere between the lines, she could almost hear the victim’s voice again, calm and certain: You’ll find out soon enough.

New Clues Added: Photo of Nate’s body language during interview, photo of cancelled dinner entry on victim’s phone, summary of unsigned NDA.