All Chapters of The Barren Wife's Revenge : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Nora walked into the laundromat with Rachel behind her. The door shut. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.Margaret got up. Her face went white. She stared at Rachel and didn't say anything for a second."Rachel." Her voice cracked on it. "You're alive.""I am. Ten years now."Margaret didn't move. She looked at the cane, then the face, then the worn coat."I looked for you. For years.""I know. I couldn't tell you I was alive. It was too dangerous.""You faked your death.""I had to. They were going to kill me. I didn't have a choice."Rachel crossed to the table and sat down. She set her cane on the floor by her chair."They hit me on the highway. Drove me off the road. My car flipped. I woke up in the hospital three weeks later. They told me it was an accident."Margaret sat down across from her, still pale. "Richard?""He knew. He came to see me once. Told me to leave, to disappear. Told me the next accident wouldn't leave a survivor."Nora sat down across from them. Priya sat

The footsteps got closer. Heavy boots on concrete. The guard was at the door.Nora looked at Vivian, then the window, then the door. She had no weapon. She didn't know how to fight.She grabbed a chair. Metal, light. She swung it at the window. The glass shattered."Out the window! Now!"The door opened. The guard filled the frame. Tall, wide, a dark coat. He saw Nora at the window and moved toward her.Nora ran, not for the door, straight at the guard. She wasn't going to fight him. She couldn't. She had never learned to throw a punch or block one, and she wasn't going to start now with a stranger twice her size, in a room with no time left to learn. She ran past him instead, grabbed Vivian, and pulled her toward the broken window.The guard reached for her. She slipped and fell hard, hitting the fire escape platform. Vivian went down beside her. The guard was at the window now, reaching through it.Nora grabbed Vivian and pulled her down the stairs. The metal was rusted, the steps n

Nora parked the car and sat there for a second in the quiet. She looked at the laundromat. The lights were on inside. The group was still there.She thought about the text. The traitor is still with you. Someone in that room had been feeding information to the unknown number. Someone had been doing it for days. Watching her, listening to her, reporting everything back, every plan they'd made since the night at the cabin.She got out, walked to the door, pushed it open, the cold air giving way to the buzz of fluorescent light as soon as she stepped inside.The group turned to look at her. Rachel got up. Margaret got up. Priya kept her eyes on her phone. Vivian sat in the corner, still pale, still quiet."Did you deliver the evidence?" Rachel asked."Yes.""When will the story run?""Soon."Nora sat down and didn't say anything else. She watched them. She studied every one of them.Rachel was calm. She'd been waiting ten years for this moment, and now that it had arrived she looked stea

# ChapterThe car moved through the city. In the back seat, Nora watched the streets go by, counting turns without meaning to. Left at the light. Right at the gas station. Straight for ten blocks, past the bank, past the diner, past a park with the swings rusted at the chains. She didn't know where they were taking her. She wanted to know how to get back.The men up front didn't talk. They didn't look at her either, not once. The seats were leather, cold through her coat. The windows were tinted so dark she could only see straight ahead, the road narrowing to nothing.She put her hand on her stomach. The baby was still there. Still hers. She didn't know if she'd survive the next hour, but she knew what she had to do: keep the baby safe, then find a way out.Rachel was still at the laundromat. Margaret too. Vivian and Priya. She'd traded herself for that, for the four of them staying put behind a locked door with the dryers running, and she made herself think about the sound of those d

The dryer was still running behind them, empty, knocking on something loose inside the drum. Nobody had gotten up to stop it. Rachel sat with her hands folded on the table. Margaret stood by the window. Vivian sat with her knees pulled up in the plastic chair, still pale from whatever they'd been feeding her, or not feeding her, back in that place. Nora sat with her hands in her lap and they had stopped shaking sometime in the last hour, she couldn't say exactly when.She thought about the man on the basement floor. She still didn't know if he was breathing when she left him. She thought she'd feel worse about that by now. She didn't know how to feel about not feeling worse.Somebody's stomach growled, hers or Margaret's, she couldn't tell which, and nobody said anything about that either. The laundromat smelled like detergent and hot metal, the smell it always had, the same smell it had probably had for twenty years before any of them ever walked into it.Priya's phone buzzed. She lo