Chapter 2

The IV left a bruise the size of a thumbprint in the crook of my arm, and I stared at it for a long time before I finally made myself sit up.

Everything hurt. My back, my hips, the place low in my stomach that used to hold something and now just held an ache I didn't have a name for. But staying in that bed meant staying in a room that smelled like antiseptic and loss, and I couldn't do it anymore.

So I got up.

I made it three steps into the hallway before I heard the laughter.

Her laughter.

It came from the room two doors down, bright and easy, the kind of laugh that fills a space up completely. I don't know why I walked toward it instead of away. Maybe some part of me still needed proof. Maybe I just wasn't done hurting myself yet.

I stopped in the doorway.

Max was sitting on the edge of Elena's bed, a little plastic cup of grapes in one hand, feeding them to her one at a time like she was something fragile and precious. He said something I didn't catch, low, easy, the kind of voice he used to use on me, and she laughed again, that same bright sound, her hand resting on his knee as it belonged there.

His mother sat in the corner chair, watching them both with a soft, satisfied smile.

The kind of smile you give people you love.

She hadn't smiled at me like that in years.

"Where's Anna?" Margaret asked, almost as an afterthought, like she'd only just remembered I existed at all.

That was it. That was all the concern I got. A stranger asking where the wife went, the way you'd ask where you left your keys.

Elena's face crumpled.

"She caused all of this." Her voice cracked on the words, tears spilling fast and pretty down her cheeks, not a hair out of place. "She pushed me, I could've lost the baby…"

She broke off into sobs, burying her face against Max's shoulder, and he wrapped both arms around her like she was the only thing in the world worth holding.

"At least the baby's fine," he murmured into her hair.

I stood frozen in that doorway, waiting, begging, silently, for him to say something else. Anything else. *And Anna? Is Anna okay?*

He didn't.

"Anna's going to face my anger for this," he said instead, and there wasn't a shred of doubt in his voice. Not a question. A promise.

I didn't wait to hear more.

I turned and walked away, my bare feet cold against the hospital tile, my chest so tight I could barely pull in a full breath. I wasn't even crying anymore. I think I'd used it all up on the bathroom floor of a house that used to feel like mine.

*Anna's going to face my anger.*

Not *is Anna okay.* Not *where is my wife, I need to check on her.*

Just anger. Like I was the one who'd done something wrong. Like I hadn't just lost a baby he didn't even know existed, on a staircase I fell trying to get away from the woman he was currently holding like glass.

I made it to the corridor before the hand closed over my mouth and nose.

Something cold and sharp-smelling flooded my senses, and I had half a second to register the panic *someone's grabbing me, this is real, this is happening* before the hallway tilted sideways and the world went dark.

---

I woke up to concrete.

Cold, damp concrete under my cheek, and a smell like mildew and old rust that crawled into the back of my throat. My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. My mouth tasted like pennies.

I pushed myself up slowly, palms scraping against the floor, and looked around at a room that didn't belong in any house I knew. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling, throwing everything into a sick yellow light. No windows. A mattress in the corner, thin and stained, no sheets. A bucket by the wall that I refused to think about the purpose of.

This wasn't a room. It was a place you put something you wanted to forget.

I got to my feet, legs shaking, and stumbled to the door. Heavy. Metal. Cold under my palms when I pressed against it.

"Hello?" My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "Is anyone there?"

Nothing.

I hit the door. Once, twice, my palm stinging with every strike.

"Let me out!" I hit it harder, both fists now, the sound echoing off concrete that didn't care how loud I screamed. "Somebody, please, let me out of here!"

I don't know how long I stood there hitting that door. Long enough that my hands went numb. Long enough that my voice cracked and broke and I kept going anyway, because the alternative was silence, and silence in that room felt like something I might not survive.

Finally, the lock turned.

Relief cracked through me for half a second *someone heard me, someone's going to help* right up until the door swung open and a man I didn't recognize filled the frame. Big. Blank-faced. The kind of man who did this sort of thing for a living and had stopped feeling anything about it a long time ago.

"I said…" I started.

The slap came before I finished the sentence.

My head snapped sideways, pain exploding across my cheek and jaw, and I tasted blood a half second before I felt my lip split against my teeth. I hit the floor. The concrete bit into my palms as I caught myself, my ears ringing, blood dripping warm off my chin onto the gray floor beneath me.

"Shut up." His voice was flat. Bored, almost. Like I was an inconvenience and nothing more. "Stop disturbing us. We're keeping you here till you learn your lesson."

I didn't answer. I couldn't. My whole face throbbed too hard to form words, and some animal part of my brain understood, clearly and instantly, that saying anything else was going to get me hit again.

He looked at me for one more second, no anger in his face, no hesitation, nothing, and then he stepped back out and locked the door behind him.

The silence that followed was worse than the one before.

I sat there on that concrete floor with blood in my mouth and my whole body shaking, and somewhere underneath the fear, something else started to take shape. Understanding. The kind that comes together slowly, piece by piece, until suddenly the whole picture is right there in front of you and you can't unsee it.

This wasn't random.

I thought back, past the hospital, past the stairs, past Elena's hand on her stomach and her voice saying *he loved me before he married you* all the way back to eight months ago. To the funeral.

Max's twin brother, Daniel, dead in a car accident on the West Side Highway. I remembered Max at the graveside, hollowed out, barely able to stand. I remembered Elena beside the casket, three months pregnant and shaking, a widow at twenty-six.

I remembered Margaret pulling Max aside at the reception, her hand gripping his arm.

*She's family now. She has nobody else. You have to look after her, Max. For Daniel.*

That was where it started. Not the affair, if it even was an affair, if it hadn't started long before Daniel died; I honestly didn't know anymore, but the neglect. The late nights that became later. The phone calls he'd take in another room. The way he stopped reaching for me in bed, the way his eyes would go somewhere else entirely whenever her name came up.

*Take care of her, for Daniel.*

I don't think Margaret meant for it to go this far. Or maybe she did. Maybe she'd been watching it happen for months and smiling every time, the same soft, satisfied smile she wore in that hospital room while her son fed grapes to another woman.

Either way, this, this locked door, this concrete floor, this blood drying sticky on my chin, didn't happen by accident.

Someone had to give the order.

Someone had to tell that man exactly where to bring me, and exactly what to do if I made too much noise.

And there was only one person with a reason to want me silent, and quiet, and out of the way, while he sat at his mistress's bedside playing husband to a woman who wasn't his wife.

It had to be Max.

It had to be, because this wasn't the first time I'd disappeared for a few days and come back with an excuse already halfway prepared for me. It wasn't the first time a door had locked behind me somewhere I never chose to be.

I just hadn't let myself say it out loud before.

I pressed my sleeve against my split lip and stared at the door, and for the first time since I woke up in that hospital bed with empty hands where a baby should have been, I felt something sharper than grief.

I felt rage.

And rage, I was starting to learn, was so much easier to survive on than heartbreak ever was.