Chapter 5: Accident

Sienna

I 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 placement and every year after, because it was the only thing that had ever been only mine.

I stood in the doorway of the bedroom I'd shared with Julian for eight years and realized, with a kind of numb clarity, that nothing in that room belonged to me either. Not the furniture Eleanor had chosen. Not the photographs on the dresser, all of them taken before things went wrong, all of them lies now in the shape of memories. I left the room exactly as it was and didn't look back at it once.

I didn't say goodbye to anyone. There was no one left in that house who would have wanted to hear it.

The drive started as nowhere, just away, just anywhere that wasn't four place settings and a daughter who flinched from my hands. Somewhere around the second red light I realized I was crying, ugly and loud, the kind of crying you do alone in a car because there's finally no one left to perform composure for.

Where was I even going?

I ran through every name I could think of and came up empty. No parents to call, because I'd never had any I remembered. No siblings, because as far as I knew I'd never had those either. No friends, because somewhere in the last eight years I'd let every one of them go, told myself I didn't need them because I had a husband and a daughter and a family, and now I understood, with a clarity that felt like drowning, that I had spent eight years building a whole life out of people who had never once chosen me back.

I had made them my entire world. And my entire world had just told me, in every way that mattered, that I didn't belong in it.

I found a hotel on my phone without really looking at the name and pointed the car toward it, because I needed somewhere to stop existing for a few hours, somewhere with no photographs of a daughter who hated me and no in-law waiting to remind me I was failing at something I'd never had a fair chance at in the first place.

The road was dark and mostly empty, streetlights spaced too far apart, throwing long stretches of black between one pool of light and the next. My eyes were still swollen, my chest tight with that low insistent pressure I'd stopped mentioning to anyone, and I was reaching for a tissue on the passenger seat, my eyes off the road for less than two seconds, when the world exploded sideways.

Headlights, too bright, too close, a horn blaring long after it should have stopped meaning anything. Then the sound, metal folding into metal, glass spraying across the dashboard in a hundred small, glittering pieces, my body wrenched hard against the seatbelt so fast the air went out of me before I understood what was happening.

Everything stopped moving. My ears were ringing.

"Hey! Hey, can you hear me?" A man's voice, muffled through the shattered window, frantic. Someone was pulling at the door handle, shouting for someone else to call for help, footsteps pounding closer from somewhere in the dark.

"She's not moving! Somebody call an ambulance, now!"

There were more voices after that, layered over each other, a woman crying, someone telling everyone to stand back, a phone held to an ear, a stranger's hand finally getting the door open and reaching in toward my shoulder like he was afraid to touch me wrong.

I couldn't answer any of them. I could hear myself breathing, wet and uneven, tasting copper, and past all the noise, past the sirens starting up somewhere in the distance, I thought about Julian.

Not with anger. There wasn't room for anger anymore, not with my chest full of glass and my own blood in my mouth. I thought about him the way you think about a door that's already closed, wondering, stupidly, uselessly, if this would finally be enough. If dying on a road he didn't even know I was driving would be the thing that made him look at me the way he used to, before his mother, before Camille, before I became a problem instead of a person.

Will you finally see me now, Julian? Now that it's too late to matter.

Someone was shouting my plate number to a dispatcher. Someone else kept saying Stay with us, stay with us, over and over, a hand pressed hard against my shoulder.

I thought about Mia.

Six years old, and she already couldn't stand the sight of me. I thought about her at fifteen, at twenty, at thirty, growing into a woman who might never remember that I was the one who carried her, who bled for her twice before I managed to keep her, who used to sing her to sleep before someone else's voice became the one she wanted instead.

Will you remember me at all? Will you remember I was your mother before I was nothing?

The voices around me were getting further away instead of closer, the sirens were swallowed by a rushing sound in my own ears, my vision narrowing at the edges like something was slowly closing a curtain.

The last thing I heard, distant and strange, was someone saying She's losing a lot of blood, we need to move now.

Then there was nothing at all.