Chapter 4

Chapter 4 

ELENA

I woke to find my things already gone from the side table — the small stack of nothing they'd let me keep, a cup, a spare gown, a paperback someone had left behind that I'd started reading out of sheer boredom — all of it cleared away, and a nurse folding fresh linens onto a different bed.

"What's happening?"

"You're being moved. New room." She didn't look up. "Bigger, better view. You'll like it."

"Nobody asked me if I wanted to move."

"It's already arranged."

"Arranged by who?"

She paused just long enough that I knew the answer before she gave it. "Those are his instructions."

I sat on the edge of the bed while two orderlies wheeled in a cart and packed up a room I hadn't even had time to think of as mine, and I felt something in my chest curdle into something colder than fear. I wasn't being treated. I was being handled.

"Why does he get a say in my room?" I asked, to no one in particular, to everyone in the room who wasn't going to answer.

The nurse gave me a look that wasn't unkind, just tired, like she'd seen this exact conversation happen to someone else once and knew exactly how it ended. "He's paying for all of it," she said. "The wing. The care. Everything."

"That doesn't mean he owns me."

She didn't answer that. She just kept folding.

They moved me two floors up, into a room that was, as promised, bigger — a suite, really, with a small sitting area and a window that looked out over a manicured courtyard three stories down, and two guards instead of one stationed outside instead of in the hallway alcove.

 Extra security, nobody explained, just appeared, the way everything else in my life seemed to be appearing lately without my permission.

It was in that new room, going through a drawer looking for something as mundane as a blanket, that I found the folder.

It had been left behind by accident, I was almost sure — tucked under a spare pillow in the closet shelf, the kind of oversight that happens when people move too fast and don't check every surface. I pulled it out with hands that were already shaking before I'd even opened it, some old animal instinct telling me this was not for me to see.

I didn't get to read further. The door opened, and I shoved the folder under the blanket on my lap just as a woman walked in — in her twenties, sleek, dressed like she'd stepped out of a boardroom rather than a hospital corridor, heels clicking sharp against the floor. She had the look of someone used to being obeyed by people who weren't in the room to overhear it.

"Elena." She said my name like she already owned it, like it was a formality she was extending me rather than a courtesy. "I'm Maria. I work for your husband."

My pulse jumped. "Then tell me his name."

She smiled, thin and unbothered, and sat in the chair across from my bed without being asked. "That's not why I'm here."

"Then why are you here?"

She studied me for a long moment, the way you'd study something you were deciding whether to bother being gentle with. 

"I came to save you some heartbreak, honestly. You don't remember him. That's almost a mercy, if you want my opinion." She crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt. "He doesn't love you. He never did, not really. Whatever you think you're going to wake up into — don't. It would have been kinder, frankly, if you hadn't woken up at all."

The words hit me like a slap in reverse, the sting landing somewhere far deeper than skin. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me." Her voice stayed level, almost bored, like she was reciting something she'd said before to someone else and found tedious the second time around. "Soon enough he'll be free of all this. You not remembering just makes it simpler for everyone."

Something in me — something I didn't recognize, something that didn't feel entirely like fear or grief but like a kind of cold, coiled fury — rose up before I'd even decided to let it.

My hand moved on its own.

The crack of it echoed off the walls, louder than I expected, and Maria staggered sideways, her heel catching on the leg of the chair, and she went down hard onto the floor, one hand flying to her cheek, her eyes wide with a shock.

The door burst open a second later — one of the guards, the older one from the first day, his hand already halfway to his hip before he took in the scene and froze, looking between Maria on the floor and me sitting upright in the bed with my palm still stinging.

For one long second, nobody moved.

"Get her out," I said. My voice came out steady, cold, certain in a way that startled even me. "Get her out of my room."

And he did. The guard actually did it — stepped forward, took Maria by the arm, and helped her up without a word of protest, as though my command outweighed whatever loyalty he owed her. She let herself be pulled toward the door, cheek blooming red, eyes burning into mine with something far uglier than shock now.

"He's going to hear about this," she said at the doorway, straightening her jacket, composing herself back into the sleek, sharp woman she'd been minutes ago. "Every word of it."

Then she was gone, heels clicking away fast down the hall, and I sat alone in the new room with my hand still trembling, more from the aftershock of my own fury than from her words.

It would have been kinder if you hadn't woken up at all. I turned the sentence over and over, looking for a way to make it hurt less, and finding none.

An hour later, a different nurse came in, brisk and businesslike, and began checking my vitals as if nothing at all had happened, as if the whole building hadn't just watched me strike a woman who worked for a man nobody would name.

"Good news," she said, not quite meeting my eyes. "You're being discharged tomorrow."

Relief and dread arrived in the same breath, tangled together so tightly I couldn't tell which one was louder. "Discharged to where?"

"Home." She said it simply, like the word meant something to me, like I had any idea what home even looked like.

 "Your husband is arranging it. The car, the transition, all of it. He wants to make sure you're comfortable."

I sat very still, the folder still hidden beneath the blanket on my lap, Maria's words still ringing in my ears, and understood that tomorrow, whether I was ready or not, whoever he was would finally stop being a rumor whispered behind half-closed doors.

Tomorrow, he would have a face.