My Parents Skipped the Funeral of My Husband and Two Children for My Sister’s Birthday, but Six Months Later, One Headline Made Them Panic When They Discovered What I Had Done. / Chapter 71 / 121

Chapter 71 - The Echo of a Dying Signal

Sixteen hours later, the escape submersible breached the surface four miles off the rugged coast of Nova Scotia.

The morning sun broke through the gray storm clouds, painting the calm sea in blinding shades of gold and silver. A fishing trawler, alerted by our emergency transponder, was already steaming toward us across the sparkling water.

Ethan climbed onto the open hatch first, drawing in a deep lungful of clean, salt-tinged air before reaching down to pull me up onto the narrow deck of the sub.

"We made it," he said, offering a genuine, weary smile. "No more running. No more ghosts."

I looked at the approaching trawler, feeling a strange, hollow quiet settling over my chest. The rage that had sustained my heartbeat for half a year had burned itself out, leaving only a vast, empty plain of grief. Now, I would finally have to mourn. I would finally have to face the silence of an empty house, the memory of David’s laugh, and the ghost of my children's voices in the hallway.

Then, the submersible's tactical satellite radio inside the cabin emitted a low, repetitive chime.

Ethan frowned. "That's impossible. The Meridian server was pulverized. There shouldn't be any active relays on this frequency."

"Leave it," I said quietly, wanting nothing more than to step onto that wooden trawler and disappear into the civilian world.

"Claire," Ethan called out, his voice suddenly sharp, strange, and strained. "You need to look at this."

A cold premonition, sharper than the freezing Atlantic wind, seized my throat. I lowered myself back down the hatch and stepped beside the navigation terminal.

The radio screen wasn't displaying text. It had automatically linked to an encrypted satellite data packet routed through an obscure military server in Geneva. A secure live video feed began buffering on the tiny monitor.

The video resolved into a clinical, white room.

It was an intensive care suite, pristine and silent, deep within what appeared to be an underground medical installation. The camera was fixed at a high angle, looking down upon two small pediatric hospital beds.

Heart monitors beeped rhythmically in the background.

Lying in the first bed was a five-year-old boy with dark curly hair, breathing steadily through an oxygen mask, an intravenous drip taped to his small wrist. In the bed beside him lay a three-year-old girl, clutching a worn stuffed rabbit—the exact duplicate of the toy I had buried in an empty coffin six months ago.

A digital timestamp in the corner of the screen read: *LIVE FEED — 08:14 AM.*

Below the video feed, a single line of text typed itself across the screen, character by character, from an unknown terminal:

*[You dismantled our financial arm, Mrs. Vance. But you never asked why Arthur was ordered to keep the bodies from the crash.]*