Blood.
Every breath scraped through my ribs like shards buried beneath my skin.
Machines hummed and beeped around me in uneven rhythms, distant and cold.
Adrian bent closer.
The instant the nurse looked away, his expression changed completely.
The tears disappeared.
His eyes turned hard.
“Remember,” he murmured, tightening his grip. “The stairs.”
That single word summed up our marriage.
Stairs.
I had supposedly fallen down them.
Walked into doors.
Hit kitchen cabinets.
Broken glass against my own face “by accident.”
Every bruise came with a carefully prepared explanation.
And every explanation came from him.
Inside our home, Adrian controlled everything.
My phone.
My clothing.
My money.
My routine.
Even the volume of my voice.
If I laughed too much, I paid for it.
If I stayed silent, he accused me of hiding something.
He called it love.
His mother called it correction.
“You should be grateful he tolerates you,” Vivian Vale often told me while sipping tea in my kitchen as I stood there with a split lip. “A weak woman like you would never survive on her own.”
Weak.
