CHAPTER 5

 

The darkness behind my eyes felt like a terrifying car crash at night. I was in the back of an ambulance, holding Angela’s small, cold hand. Her face was pale, a stark contrast to the dark blood matting her hair.

“Daddy’s coming, baby,” I whispered, my voice cracking with a lie I desperately wanted to believe. “He’s coming. He has the special blood. He’s going to make it all better.”

Her eyelids fluttered. “He promised… he’d read me a story…”

In the nightmare, I could feel the life seeping out of her, a slow, terrible leak. I chafed her hands, pulled my coat tighter around her, trying to keep her warm. “Stay with me, Angela. Stay with Mommy. Please.”

The hospital. The frantic rush. The doctor’s grim face.

“We need to operate now. She’s lost too much blood. We need the transfusion. Where is Mr. Arcony? We’ve paged him six times.”

My own voice, shrill with panic. “He’s not answering! He’s at dinner! Please, you have to find him!”

But he was unreachable. Seated at a candlelit table, laughing, toasting with Stella while my world ended in a sterile, bright room.

“Mommy… I’m cold…”

I was holding her, rocking her, trying to pour my own warmth into her. “I know, baby, I know. Daddy’s almost here.” But he wasn’t. He never came.

The flatline was a sound that didn’t just echo in the room; it vibrated through my very soul. A long, relentless beeeeeep that meant everything was over.

“No! No, try again! You have to try again! She’s just cold! I need to keep her warm!”

I was sobbing, clinging to her lifeless body, refusing to let them take her, trying to rub feeling back into her tiny, perfect hands.

“Gwen. Gwen, wake up.”

A voice, rough with sleep, cut through the nightmare. A hand shook my shoulder. I gasped, jolting awake, tears streaming down my face, the sound of the flatline still a phantom scream in my ears.

Lanc was leaning over me in the dark of my bedroom. He’d apparently let himself in again. “You were crying in your sleep. Another bad dream?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only sob, the visceral horror of the memory—of holding my dead child—still clinging to me.

He misinterpreted my tears entirely. He made a low, soothing sound in his throat. “Shhh, it’s alright. I’m here.”

His arms went around me, but it wasn’t comfort. It was possession. His touch, once something I craved, now felt like a violation. He was holding the woman who had just been living through the moment his choices had created.

“Don’t,” I choked out, trying to push him away, but my limbs were heavy with grief and sleep.

“Let me make it better,” he murmured, his voice thick with a different kind of need. His hands began to roam, not offering solace, but taking it. His lips found my neck, and the intimacy of it felt like a profanity. My body was a tomb for my child, and he was treating it like his playground.

“Lanc, stop,” I said, my voice firmer, laced with revulsion. “I said stop.”

He ignored me, his grip tightening, his breathing becoming heavier. He was lost in his own narrative, where his touch was a cure for any ailment. “You need this. You need to relax. Let me take care of you.”

This wasn’t comfort. It was dominance. It was him reasserting control over a body and a mind that had dared to escape him. He was trying to fuck the memory of our daughter’s death out of me.

The thought unleashed a fury so potent it burned away the last of my grogginess.

“GET OFF OF ME!” I snarled, bucking against him.

He was stronger, pinning me down. “Stop fighting me, Gwen.”

It was then that his phone, on the nightstand, lit up and began to ring. The shrill tone sliced through the tense air. The caller ID flashed: Stella Huzon.

It was like a switch flipped. His predatory focus broke. He released me with a grunt of irritation and grabbed the phone.

“Stella? What is it?” His voice was instantly coated with a concerned, sugary warmth. A pause. “Jenny had a nightmare? She’s asking for me?” He was already swinging his legs out of bed, turning his back to me as if I were already forgotten. “Tell her Uncle Lanc is on his way. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

He ended the call and stood, straightening his clothes. He didn’t even look at me.

That was it. The final, ultimate abandonment, replayed in grotesque miniature. My nightmare, my terror, my grief—all interrupted and dismissed for a call from them.

As he turned to leave, something in me snapped. I launched myself off the bed, not in tears, but in a silent, feral rage. I didn’t scream. I didn’t shout. I just grabbed his arm as he reached for the doorknob and sank my teeth into the fleshy part of his forearm, hard.

He roared in pain and surprise, wrenching his arm away. “You bitch! Are you insane?”

I shoved him with all my strength, catching him off balance. He stumbled back against the doorframe, clutching his bleeding arm and staring at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and shaking, my breath coming in ragged gasps. “If you ever touch me again, I will bite it off. Now get out and go to your new daughter. That’s all you’ve ever wanted anyway.”

He looked from his bleeding arm to my face, his eyes wide with shock and fury. Without another word, he turned and left, slamming the door so hard the walls shook.

I stood there, alone in the dark, the taste of his blood metallic and empowering on my tongue. The ghost of Angela’s cold hand was finally gone. In its place was a burning, furious heat.

He had chosen them. Again.

And this time, I had finally fought back.

The slam of the door was a full stop. An end. I taste the sharp tang of copper on my tongue. I stood there in the center of the room, my chest heaving, the silence he left behind roaring in my ears. It was over. Truly over. He had crossed a line from which there was no return, and in doing so, he had finally freed me.

I didn’t sleep. I didn’t cry. I cleaned. I scrubbed the spot on the floor where he’d stood bleeding, erasing every trace of him. I washed the taste of him from my mouth. I changed the sheets, bundling them up as if they were contaminated. As the first grey light of dawn filtered through the windows, my apartment was sterile, quiet, and wholly mine again.

The anger sat heavy inside me, stronger than the grief, and it kept me going.

My new phone, a cheap burner he couldn’t trace, rang. The number was unknown. For a wild second, I thought it might be him, having gotten the number through some corporate espionage. But the voice on the other end was hesitant, kind.

“Mrs. Arcony? It’s Dr. Sapiera. Arthur Sapiera. I… I was your attending physician last night.”

My grip tightened on the phone. “How did you get this number?”

“Your husband’s assistant called my service for a follow-up. I insisted on speaking to you directly to discuss your… care. She reluctantly gave me the number he had listed for you. I take it it’s new.”

“It is,” I said, my voice flat.

There was a pause. “What he did last night… forcing his way in, his demeanor… it was highly inappropriate. As a physician, I am concerned for your well-being. Not just physically.”

The kindness was a chisel against the stone of my anger. A tiny crack appeared. “Thank you, Doctor. But I’m fine.”

“Are you?” he asked gently. “What you described… about his search for this other woman… it’s been preying on my mind. The psychological profile of such an obsession… it’s not healthy. For him, or for those around him.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered, sinking onto the couch.

“Mrs. Arcony… Gwen… may I speak frankly? Off the record?”

“Please.”

“I looked at your file from the hospital. Your daughter’s file. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The blood type. The timing. The… reallocation of the bone marrow donor.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a monstrous injustice. And for a man to be so blinded by a fantasy that he fails to see the tragedy right in front of him… it’s a special kind of tragedy.”

He was the first person outside of myself to acknowledge it. To say the words out loud. The crack in my anger widened, and a sliver of raw pain peeked through.

“What can I do, Doctor?” The question was a whisper. “He’s untouchable. His family is untouchable. They have all the money, all the power.”

“Perhaps not all the power,” Dr. Sapiera said quietly. “Knowledge is power. And sometimes, the past has a way of resurfacing. This woman he searches for… have you ever considered trying to find her yourself?”

The idea was so absurd, so left-field, I almost laughed. “Why would I do that? So he can leave me for his one true love and live happily ever after? I think I’ve suffered enough for his fantasy, thank you.”

“No,” the doctor said, his voice firm. “Not for him. For you. Knowledge is a weapon, Gwen. Understanding the root of his obsession might be the only way to break its hold on you. And perhaps… to hold him accountable. If this woman exists, if she is a real person and not a fever-dream, she deserves to know the wreckage he’s left in his wake searching for her. And you deserve to know what you were always up against. It wasn’t you. It was never you.”

The words landed with the force of a physical blow. It was never you.

He was right. I had spent years trying to be enough, trying to be prettier, quieter, more understanding, all to compete with a ghost. What if I could find the ghost? What if I could make her real?

“How?” I asked, my mind already racing. “It was over a decade ago. He had nothing then. No money, no resources. He says he was in a bad part of the city. He never knew her name.”

“He must have had something,” Dr. Sapiera insisted. “A detail. A description. Something he latched onto. Think. Did he ever mention anything specific?”

I closed my eyes, sifting through the drunken confession from years ago. The memory was hazy, blurred by time and my own unwillingness to dwell on the story of his “angel.”

“He said…” I began, frowning in concentration. “He said she had a voice like honey and smoke. He said her daughter… the little girl… she had a stuffed animal. A rabbit. A white rabbit with one chewed ear. He said the little girl held it while he slept, that it was the last thing he saw before the fever took him under.”

A white rabbit with one chewed ear.

It was nothing. It was everything.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said, my voice suddenly clear and strong.

“What will you do?”

A slow, cold smile touched my lips. “I’m going hunting for a rabbit.”