I spent months drowning in guilt, apologizing to my husband for “failing” to give him a child. I didn’t know that while I was grieving a tragedy, he was celebrating a successful execution.
The silence in the delivery room was the loudest thing I have ever heard. At 38 weeks, our son, Noah, was born sleeping. The doctors called it an “unexplained placental abruption.” I called it the end of my life.
For months, I was a shell of a person. I hated my body. I hated that it had failed to protect the one thing I loved most. Through it all, my husband, Ryan, was my rock. He held me while I screamed. He took time off work. He told me, over and over, “We will get through this. It’s not your fault.”
He played the grieving father so perfectly that I almost missed the cracks in his performance.
The Garage
Six months after the funeral, I finally gathered the energy to clean out the garage. Ryan had been promising to do it but “never found the time.” I wanted to keep busy, to stop thinking.
I was moving a stack of old paint cans when I found a small, locked tackle box on the top shelf behind the winter tires. We didn’t fish.
I shouldn’t have opened it. But grief makes you do strange things. I smashed the lock with a hammer.
Inside, there was no fishing gear. There was a mortar and pestle, dusted with white powder. There were several empty blister packs of a medication I didn’t recognize, and a receipt from an online pharmacy based in another country.
I Googled the medication name on the blister pack. Misoprostol. It’s a medication used to treat ulcers, but it has a well-known off-label use: inducing labor and causing abortion.
The Smoothies
The room spun. My knees hit the concrete. Suddenly, the memories of my pregnancy flooded back. Ryan had been so attentive. Specifically, he had insisted on making me my “vitamin smoothie” every single morning.
“You need your strength for the baby,” he would say, handing me the green sludge. “Drink it all down.”
He hadn’t been nourishing our son. He had been poisoning him. He had been crushing those pills in the garage, mixing them into the fruit, and feeding them to me day after day, trying to force a miscarriage. And when it didn’t happen early on, he kept doing it, until the dosage finally triggered the abruption that killed Noah at full term.
The Confession
I didn’t scream. I went cold. I took photos of everything. Then I walked into the living room where Ryan was watching football.
“I found the box, Ryan,” I said, my voice dead. “I found the pills.”
He didn’t jump. He didn’t look scared. He just paused the TV and sighed, like he was annoyed that I had interrupted the game.
“I told you not to go digging in the garage,” he said flatly.
“You killed him,” I whispered. “You killed our son.”
He looked me in the eye, and the look on his face haunts me more than the delivery room. It was pure indifference. “I never wanted a kid, Laura. You knew that. You trapped me with the pregnancy. I wasn’t going to spend the next 18 years paying for a mistake. I handled it.”
“Handled it?” I choked out. “You murdered a baby!”
“I solved a problem,” he said, standing up. “And now that he’s gone, we can go back to how things were. Just you and me. Isn’t that better?”
The Arrest
I ran out the door and dialed 911 from the driveway. When the police arrived, Ryan was calm. He actually thought he could talk his way out of it. But he didn’t know I had the box. He didn’t know I had the receipt with his name on it. And he didn’t know that the autopsy samples from Noah were still on file, allowing toxicologists to test for the specific drug found in the garage.
They cuffed him on the front lawn. The neighbors watched as the “grieving father” was shoved into the back of a cruiser.
The Text
They took his phone as evidence, but before they did, he managed to send me one last message. I read it while sitting in the interrogation room, wrapped in a blanket.
Ryan: “I did this for us. You’ll thank me one day when you realize how much freedom I just bought you.”
Ryan is currently awaiting trial for first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. It turns out, poisoning a pregnant woman to kill her fetus is a crime that carries a life sentence.
I am not thankful for my “freedom.” I am living in a nightmare. But at least I know the truth now. My body didn’t fail me. My husband did. And while I lost my son, I made sure that the monster who took him will never see freedom again.
