All Chapters of Too late, dear husband; Mrs Grant is done: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

MIREYA SARAI GRANT The beeping was the first thing I noticed, steady and rhythmic, the kind of sound that would have been easy to ignore if my whole body didn’t already feel wrong. My eyelids were too heavy to lift, my bones felt packed with something thick and cold, and underneath all of it sat a hollow ache in my stomach that didn’t match the rest of the pain. Like something had been there and wasn’t anymore. “Mrs. Grant? Can you hear me?” I forced my eyes open against the fluorescent light until a face swam into focus — a woman in blue scrubs was watching me with the kind of practiced calm that meant she’d done this a thousand times. “Where—” My voice came out as a rasp I barely recognized. “Where am I?” “You’re in the hospital. You were brought in by ambulance.” She replied and the word hospital triggered my memory— the floor, the blood spreading under me, my own voice on the phone begging Malcolm to save me. “What happened to me?” “The doctor will explain,” she said, a

MIREYA SARAI GRANT Can I have my Malcolm back? Samara’s question was still playing in my head when I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror, and for a second I barely recognized the woman looking back — swollen eyes, hollow face, like a ghost had put on my skin and forgotten how to fill it out properly. I pressed my palms against the sink and made myself breathe. She’s my sister. I shouldn’t be afraid of her. But I was, and no amount of telling myself otherwise changed that. She’d taken his attention, my place in my own home, and now she wanted the one thing I had left — the man I’d married even when he didn’t love me, even when he made sure I knew it, because I’d told myself for three years that if I just stayed long enough, he’d finally see me. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed the tears back down. I didn’t have time to cry again. I had a company to run. I’d started working at Malcolm’s company right after the wedding, telling myself that if I proved I could be his equa

MIREYA SARAI GRANT I stared at my own signature until the letters blurred into something I didn’t recognize. The ink was still wet. I touched it without meaning to, and it smeared black under my thumb, spreading across the page like a bruise, like if I pressed hard enough I could smudge the whole thing out of existence. I couldn’t. Three years of signing things that built his future, and this was the first one that had ever undone mine instead. I twisted the wedding ring on my finger until my skin burned, tugging at it once, hard, before I made myself stop. Not yet. ----- Upstairs, I opened the closet and started pulling things out — dresses, suits, a sweater he’d given me two birthdays ago. Then my hand found something soft, tucked where I’d hidden it days ago without letting myself think about why. The ultrasound. The black-and-white image looked up at me — a small curved shape that had been a whole person, apparently, for seven months I never felt her move. “Approximately s