Chapter one: Seven Candles

POV: Roza

"You burned it again."

That was the first thing Callum ever said to me in the kitchen. Three months into our marriage, a Sunday morning, eggs on the stove, his mother's recipe that I had written out by hand and practiced twice. He said it without looking up from his phone. He poured his coffee, picked up his briefcase, and walked back out, and I stood there with the smoke curling around me and that single sentence sitting in my chest like a stone I did not yet know I would carry for seven years.

I should have understood him then. I should have read that moment for exactly what it was. But I was twenty-three and newly married and desperately in love with a man who looked at me like a problem he had agreed to manage, and I told myself it would get better. That he would soften. That somewhere beneath the grey eyes and the expensive suits and the silences that filled our house like weather, there was a man who would one day choose me.

Seven years. That was how long it took me to stop waiting.

Tonight was our anniversary, and the house smelled of vanilla and warm sugar because I had been in the kitchen since two in the afternoon making him a cake he had not asked for and would not mention. Three tiers. Lemon cream between each layer. Icing dusted over the top the way I had seen in a magazine, careful and slow, because the kitchen was the one room in this marriage that had never made me feel like an inconvenience. I piped the last rosette of frosting and stepped back and looked at it, and for just a moment, standing in the warm amber light above the hob with flour on my wrist and the cake sitting there between us like an offering, I let myself feel something close to hope.

Seven candles. I had not yet lit them.

He had not called. He had not texted. He had come home at half past eight without warning, the way he always did, and gone straight to the study without passing through the kitchen, and I had heard the door click shut and gone back to the frosting and not said a word, because that was the language of this marriage. Silence as agreement. Absence as answer.

I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and went upstairs.

The pregnancy test was on the edge of the bathroom sink where I had left it four hours ago. The room was still and closed, the small window shut, the last of the evening light gone. I had taken the test in the afternoon, alone, the way I did everything in this house, and I had sat on the bathroom floor for twenty minutes afterward unable to move, just pressing my spine against the cool wood of the cabinet and breathing, because the thing I was looking at was not possible and was also undeniably real.

Two pink lines.

He had told me I was barren. Not once but over and over, in the particular way Callum delivered cruelty, which was never shouting, never dramatic, always quiet and factual, as though he were correcting a report. Three years into the marriage, when I had finally worked up the courage to suggest fertility tests, he had looked up from his laptop and said, without any particular heat, "Roza, I think the problem is less medical and more that you are simply not the kind of woman men want children with." He had gone back to his screen after that. I had gone to the bathroom and turned the shower on and sat on the tiles and cried until the water went cold.

That was four years ago. I had not raised the subject again.

Now I picked up the test and looked at it in the bathroom mirror, holding it next to my own face, and I thought about those four years. The fertility apps I deleted so he would not see them. The prenatal vitamins I hid in a coat pocket. The nights I lay awake in the dark on my side of the bed, which was the only side he allowed me, counting backwards from the date of my last cycle and telling myself it was fine, it was just stress, it would happen when it was meant to happen.

It had happened.

Something moved through me then, hot and sudden and nothing like the sadness I had been living inside for years. It was fury. Clean and precise and very, very quiet. The kind that does not need to raise its voice because it has already decided what it is going to do.

He was wrong. He had always been wrong. And tonight I was going to walk through that study door and show him the evidence in my hand and watch his face change.

I smoothed my dress. I looked at myself in the mirror, properly, the way I had stopped doing years ago because his voice had made me afraid of my own reflection. I was full-figured and auburn-haired and my eyes were green in good light, and I was carrying the thing he had told me I could never carry, and I was done.

I wrapped the test in a square of tissue and held it in my hand and walked out of the bathroom.

The landing was dark. The study light showed under the door at the end of the hall. I could hear something behind it, low and indistinct, and I thought at first it was the television. I raised my hand to knock.

Then I heard her laugh.

The sound went through me like cold water. I knew that laugh. I had known it for twelve years. I lowered my hand and stood in the dark hallway for three full seconds while something in my chest began to understand what my mind had not yet caught up to.

I opened the door.