Chapter 3

Daylight felt wrong on my skin.

That was the first thing I noticed when they finally opened that door: not relief, not even fear anymore, just the strange, sick shock of sunlight after two days of a single yellow bulb. My eyes watered. My legs nearly gave out on the stairs going up. Nobody offered a hand.

They walked me back into the house like nothing had happened. Like I hadn't spent two nights on a stained mattress nursing a split lip with the hem of my shirt.

Max was waiting in the living room.

He stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, and for one stupid heartbeat, some small, wrecked part of me hoped he'd run to me the way he used to. That he'd take one look at my face and fall apart with guilt.

He didn't move.

He just looked at me. Up and down, slow, like he was inspecting something he was disappointed in.

"You caused this to yourself." His voice was calm. That was the part that scared me, how calm it was, like he was stating the weather. "Trying to kill Elena's baby because you're jealous."

The words landed somewhere behind my ribs and just sat there, too absurd to even fight at first.

"I didn't…" My voice cracked. I hated that it cracked. "Max, she pushed me."

He crossed the room in a few slow steps and crouched down in front of the chair they'd put me in, close enough that I could smell his cologne, the same one he used to wear on our anniversaries.

"Don't try this again." His hand came up, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear, gentle, like he was talking to something small and breakable. "You know I don't like treating you like this. But you make me do it, baby. You keep pushing and pushing, and it's because you're jealous; nothing is going on between Elena and me. There never has been. So stop this. Stop all of it."

I stared at him.

Two years of marriage, and I was hearing my own history rewritten in real time, right in front of me, delivered so smoothly I almost believed it myself.

Almost.

"I want a divorce."

I said it quietly at first, testing the words in my mouth like they might shatter something. Then I said it again, louder, because saying it quietly hadn't felt like enough.

"I want a divorce, Max."

Something shifted in his face. Fear, real fear, flickering under the calm for just a second before he caught it and smoothed it back down.

"You can't say that, baby." His voice dropped, soft again, coaxing. "You don't mean that."

"I don't want to stay with you anymore." I was shouting now, two years of swallowed anger finally cracking loose all at once. "I don't want to be here. I don't want you. I don't want any of…."

The slap came before I even saw his hand move.

My head snapped sideways, pain blooming hot and immediate across my cheek, and for a second the whole room went white and silent, like someone had cut the sound out of the world. I pressed my palm to my face. My skin throbbed under my fingers.

I looked at him.

I don't know what he saw in my face in that moment, but whatever it was, it broke something open in him. He dropped to his knees in front of the chair, his hands shaking as they hovered near my face without touching it, like he wanted to fix what he'd just done and didn't know how.

"I'm so sorry." His voice cracked. "It was a mistake, Anna, I swear to God, it was a mistake, please don't say you want a divorce, you know I love you, you know I do…"

I looked at his hands.

The same hands that used to hold mine across restaurant tables. The same hands that slid a ring onto my finger in front of two hundred people who watched him promise to cherish me. The same hands that just now, without hesitation, without even a full second of thought, hit me hard enough to make my ears ring.

Something in me went very still.

Not calm. Not forgiving. Still, the way the air goes still right before a storm actually hits.

I pushed myself up out of the chair. My legs shook, from the two days locked away, from the slap, from all of it, but I made them carry me anyway, past him, toward the stairs.

"Anna, wait…"

I didn't wait.

I made it to our bedroom on legs that didn't feel like mine anymore, shut the door, and threw the lock before he caught up. A second later his weight hit the other side, the whole door shuddering in its frame.

"Anna, open the door. Please. Baby, please, just talk to me."

I backed away from it, my hand pressed to my throbbing cheek, and slid down until I was sitting with my spine against the foot of our bed. The banging kept going. His voice kept going, softer now, pleading, the same voice that used to whisper how much he loved me in the dark.

I didn't open the door.

I sat there, and I listened to him beg, and for the first time since I'd woken up in that hospital bed with empty hands, I didn't feel like crying.

I felt clear.

That's the thing nobody tells you about the moment you finally see someone for who they really are: it doesn't come with tears. It comes with a kind of quiet you didn't know you had in you. I thought about the baby I lost on those stairs. I thought about Elena's hand on her stomach, and Margaret's soft, satisfied smile, and the concrete floor of a room I never should have woken up in.

I thought about *jealous.*

Like I'd imagined the last eight months. Like I'd imagined his hands on my face just now.

The banging on the door finally stopped. I heard him slide down against it on the other side; I could tell by the way his voice dropped, closer to the floor now, tired.

"I love you," he said, quiet enough that I almost missed it. "I know I don't show it right. I know I've been, I know things have been bad. But I love you, Anna. Please don't leave me."

I stayed silent.

Part of me, the part that still remembered him carrying me over that same threshold on our wedding night, laughing so hard he nearly dropped me, wanted to open that door. Wanted to let him hold me and tell me it would all be different now, because some small, stubborn piece of me still wanted to believe that version of him existed somewhere underneath all of this.

But I pressed my hand against my cheek, still hot from where he'd hit me, and I remembered the concrete floor. I remembered the man with no name and no hesitation who'd split my lip without blinking. I remembered *at least the baby's fine* and the sound of Elena's laughter drifting down a hospital hallway while I bled alone.

That version of Max, the one who loved me, the one I married, I wasn't even sure he still existed.

Maybe he never had.

I sat there against the foot of our bed until his voice on the other side of the door finally went quiet, until I heard his footsteps retreat down the hallway, slow and heavy, like a man walking away from something he wasn't ready to let go of.

I stayed on that floor a long time after he left.

I thought about my mother, three states away, who never liked Max from the start and never once said *I told you so* even when she probably should have. I thought about the savings account I'd kept quietly, stupidly small, because I never let myself plan for a life outside this marriage. I thought about lawyers, and locks, and how a person builds an escape route out of a life they used to want so badly.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, empty, still, that ache not gone yet and maybe never fully going, and I made myself a promise.

Whatever it took. However long it took.

I was getting out of this house, and out of this marriage, and out of the version of my life where Max Whitfield got to decide what I deserved.

I just had to survive long enough to do it.