Chapter: Chapter 8: AttackSiennaThe photograph was still in my hand when the pain hit, sudden and enormous, like something inside my chest had simply given up holding its shape. It wasn't like anything I'd felt before, not even in the weeks since Dr. Whitfield's diagnosis, not even in the ache that had been living under my ribs for months. This was different. This felt like dying.I couldn't breathe. I couldn't call out. My hand closed on the blanket instead of Adam's arm, fingers digging into the thin fabric like it might anchor me to something, and the monitor beside me went from its patient steady beeping into something frantic and shrieking, and the last thing I saw before the room tilted sideways was Adam's face going white as he shot up out of his chair shouting for help."Something's wrong, get someone in here now!"After that there was only noise. Hands on me, a mask over my face, a nurse's voice counting something out loud, the door banging open and more footsteps flooding in, and underneath all of i
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
Chapter: Chapter 7: Sister?SiennaThe first thing I understood, before I came to, was that I was not supposed to still be breathing. There was a weight in my chest that felt like it belonged to someone larger than me, and every breath came slowly and deliberately, like my body had forgotten how to do it without being told.There was a machine somewhere near my head keeping steady, patient time, and my whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, borrowed and badly fitted. I tried to move my hand and something tugged at the back of it, a line taped down, and the effort alone left me exhausted enough to want to slide back under."She's awake." A woman's voice, brisk, professional. "Get the doctor."I forced my eyes open against a light that felt too bright and too white, and the first face I found wasn't a nurse's at all.It was mine.Not exactly. But close enough that for one long, disoriented moment I thought I was looking at a mirror someone had propped up beside the bed, a man's face built from the same
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
Chapter: Chapter 6: About Your WifeJulianI heard the front door close sometime after lunch, quiet, deliberate, the kind of closing that doesn't want to be noticed, and some part of me knew exactly what it meant before I let myself think about it.Sienna was gone.I told myself she needed air. She'd been doing that more lately, disappearing for an hour or two without saying where, and I'd stopped asking, partly because I didn't have the energy for another conversation that ended in her crying and me feeling like the villain in my own house. It was easier not to ask. Easier to let her have her hour and come back on her own, the way she always did, the way I'd trained myself to expect without ever once wondering what she did with those hours, or who she spent them with, or whether she was even still choosing to come back at all.I went back to my emails. There was a shipment delayed out of the Shanghai office, and Mother wanted an update on Camille's rest schedule, and somewhere underneath all of it was the memory of Si
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
Chapter: Chapter 5: AccidentSiennaI stood in the study for a long time after the door shut behind them, listening to Mia's voice fade down the hallway, bright and easy, already telling Camille about some dream she'd had, already a whole daughter I didn't get to know anymore.Something in me went very quiet then. Not sad, exactly. Finished.I went upstairs and pulled the suitcase down from the closet before I'd even decided to use it, and once I started packing I couldn't seem to stop, hands moving faster than my thoughts, folding things I didn't remember choosing. It should have taken longer. Eight years should have accumulated more than one suitcase, but when I stood there looking at what was actually mine, there wasn't much. A few dresses Eleanor had never approved of. My sketchbooks, full of designs I'd stopped believing anyone would ever let me make. A small wooden bird one of the older boys at the orphanage had carved for me the year I turned ten, the only thing that had followed me through every foster p
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
Chapter: Chapter 4: Are You Fighting AgainSiennaI barely slept. I lay awake most of the night replaying the look on Elias's face when he told me I didn't have to carry everything alone, turning the words over the way I'd turned that stone over in my fingers, trying to decide if I believed either one. By the time the sky went grey outside my window I was already dressed, already rehearsing the words I hadn't managed to say to him the night before, because if I couldn't say them to a stranger who was kind to me, I had to at least try saying them to the man I married.I caught Julian alone in the study before Eleanor was awake and before Camille came down for breakfast, because I'd learned by then that alone was the only way to reach him at all. Even then, I stood outside the door for a full minute before I made myself go in, my hand hovering over the handle as if it might still be a mistake."Julian. I need to talk to you. Really talk to you, not for thirty seconds this time."He didn't look up from his laptop. "I have a call
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
Chapter: Chapter 3: EliasSiennaI didn't stop driving until the streets stopped looking familiar, my coat still buttoned wrong from how fast I'd grabbed it off the hook, my eyes still stinging from the cold outside that front door. I didn't remember choosing a direction.My hands had simply turned the wheel the way they always did lately, steering me somewhere that wasn't home before the rest of me caught up with the decision. Somehow I still ended up outside Elias's studio, the way water finds the lowest point without meaning to.The lights were still on upstairs, warm and yellow against the dark street, the only window on the whole block that looked like anyone inside actually wanted to be there. I sat in the car for a long time before I made myself go in, watching my own breath fog the windshield, trying to remember what my face was supposed to look like when it wasn't falling apart.The bell over the door announced me before I could change my mind. Elias looked up from his bench, reading glasses pushed in
Last Updated: 2026-09-25
LOGIN
