50 Seconds to Eternity: A Prologue

The short prologue to a novel I may try to work on. 


A ringing phone broke the nighttime silence.
  “Umm, hello?”
  “Baby?” a scared voice replied.
  “Lauren?”
  “Yes.”
  “Is, is everything okay?”
  “No honey it’s not.”
  “What’s the matter?”
  “I’m about to die.”
  Henry Slade bolted upright in his bed. He flipped on the lamp that sat on his nightstand, and glanced at the alarm clock: 2:03 a.m.
  “Lauren, what’s the matter?”
  The voice on the other end hesitated. Henry could hear Lauren’s heavy breathing coming through the phone’s speaker accompanied by hysteric screaming in the background.
  “The plane. The plane is going down.”
  Seconds earlier, when the phone rang, waking Henry from sleep, his heart sped up. When Lauren, his wife of seventeen years, said she was about to die, his heart sped faster. The last statement caused his heart to come to a screeching halt.
  “No, no, no,” Henry sputtered. “What? Why?”
  “Baby, I just want you to know I love you. Whatever happens, I’ll always, and I’ve always loved you. I‘m so, so sorry for what I did.”
  Henry was speechless. The cobwebs of sleep were already whisked away. His thinking was clear but, he didn’t have time to think.
  To Henry, it felt like someone was pointing a gun to his head and asking him for his last words. In this case, to Lauren, the next words out of his mouth may very well be the last time he ever speaks to her, barring a miracle.
  A miracle he didn’t want to happen.
  He couldn’t forgive her. That’s why she was on the plane.
  “Henry? Henry?!” she cried.
  “Goodbye,” Henry said, and hung up the phone.