Chapter 4 #2
His fingers tightened. I pulled the life jacket toward me.
He held on. We stood face-to-face while the world disintegrated around us, still fighting over an orange scrap of life as though it were the last truth of our marriage.
I saw his gaze drop to my stomach, then return to my face, saw the calculations working beneath his skin.
If I was pregnant, I was a risk. If I was lying, I was an obstacle.
If I lived, I was a problem. If I died, there would be a eulogy, his mother in a black dress, a press release from the foundation, a neat story about his unstable wife.
Suddenly, I saw all his options with perfect clarity, and in none of them did he love me.
"Prove it later," he said almost soundlessly. "For now, give her a chance."
"Who is going to give me one?"
He did not answer.
Sometimes silence is not the absence of an answer.
It is an answer so vile that a person cannot bring himself to say it aloud.
But apparently Adrian found another way to say it.
He jerked the life jacket hard. I cried out as the strap tore the skin from my palm.
Pain flashed white, and my fingers opened on their own.
He took it. Simply took it. The way he had taken my right to doctors, the truth, friends, my own version of our family.
I watched the orange life jacket pass into his hands and could not breathe.
Not because of the smoke. Because the man I had wanted to surprise with news of our child that morning had just ripped away my chance to survive.
"Adrian," I said quietly.
He stopped midstep but did not turn.
"If I die, you’ll know you killed us both."
That made him look. Over his shoulder. Quickly and harshly, with such a flash of rage that one might have thought I was the one committing a crime by calling his by its proper name.
"Enough," he said. "You always did know how to hurt me at the last possible moment."
For a second, I could not even understand what he had said.
Me? Hurt him? I wanted to ask exactly which moment had been his last: in his office with Nikki, on the stage, outside the ladies’ room while his mother planned her fraud, or now, as he carried my life jacket to another woman.
But my voice disappeared. He went back to Nikki.
She held out her arms like a spoiled child finally receiving the toy she had been promised, and Adrian put the life jacket on her.
My life jacket. He guided her arms through the openings, adjusted the straps, snapped the buckles across her chest, tightened it at her waist, and each separate movement struck me.
Click. Another. Another. The sound of the plastic buckles was louder than the explosion.
The explosion was destroying the yacht. Those clicks were destroying what remained of me.
Nikki cried, but watched me over his shoulder. Not the entire time. No, she was too clever to gloat openly in front of him. But she caught my eye at the exact moment Adrian tightened the final strap. Her lips trembled, and she whispered so only I could hear:
"I’m sorry. There isn’t enough room."
I’m sorry. She said it with such a sugary tremor that I nearly vomited onto the wet deck. Vivian stood beside her, clutching the rail, and looked at me without even hatred. Only weary disgust. The way one looks at a stain that refuses to come out of an expensive tablecloth.
"Into the lifeboat!" one of the guards shouted. "Move!"
Adrian helped Nikki climb over. Then Vivian. Then the same bag, which was passed carefully from hand to hand, handled with more care than the living people around it. I took a step toward them. One. Then another. The deck shifted under my feet, but I caught a wet stanchion and stayed upright.
"Adrian," I called, no longer shouting. My voice had gone dull and strange, as though it came from deep beneath the water.
"I’m coming with you."
A guard blocked my path. Not roughly at first. He simply extended an arm in front of me.
"No room."
I looked at the lifeboat. At Nikki in my life jacket. At Vivian. At Kyle. At the bag lying by Adrian’s feet. At the empty corner of the bench where my body could have fit if someone had removed the leather case full of documents.
"There’s room right there," I said.
The guard did not look.
"I was told there isn’t."
I shifted my gaze to Adrian. He stood inside the lifeboat, holding a rope with one hand and Nikki with the other as she pressed herself against his side. His face was stone. But I knew he could hear me. He heard everything.
"Tell him," I said. "Tell your dog there’s room for your wife."
Nikki sobbed.
"Adrian, please, she’s going to jump in! She’ll capsize us!"
Vivian said sharply:
"Adrian, you cannot risk everyone’s life over one woman’s hysteria."
One woman’s hysteria. That was what they called me at the last moment.
Not Lana. Not his wife. Not the mother of his possible child.
Not the woman they had devoured piece by piece for three years.
Hysteria. Adrian closed his eyes for one second.
When he opened them, I knew what he would say before his lips even moved.
"Step away from the edge, Lana."
I laughed. Quietly. Brokenly. Entirely out of place.
"Step away? Are we back at the gala, Mr. Mercer? Should I curtsy and wish your new family a pleasant voyage?"
He went pale.
"Don’t make this worse."
"For whom? You? The press? Nikki? Your mother? Or my child, whose father just traded away its seat in a lifeboat for a bag of documents?"
"It isn’t my child until I know that it is," he said.
I stopped laughing.
Everything went quiet. Not around me. Around me, metal roared and groaned, people wept, and orders and curses filled the air. It went quiet inside me. So quiet I could hear the last slender twig of my old love snapping somewhere very far away.
"Thank you," I said.
He frowned, clearly not expecting that.
"For what?"
"For making your choice vile enough that I’ll never invent another excuse for you."
At that moment, the lifeboat’s line jerked.
One guard shouted to someone below while another began shoving back the people trying to break through.
Someone struck me from the side. My shoulder hit the stanchion, and I nearly dropped my clutch.
My clutch. The box. The test. The note. I pressed it to my chest as if it held not a piece of plastic but the baby itself.
One of the guests, a wild-eyed man with his shirt collar torn open, tried to force his way past the guard.
The guard drove an elbow into him. The man fell and grabbed the hem of my dress, ripping the seam.
I heard it far too clearly. Expensive silk tears much like human dignity, only faster.
"Let me through!" I shouted at the guard. "I’m pregnant!"
This time he looked at me. Something human flickered in his eyes, frightened and uncertain. For one second. Then Adrian spoke a single word from the lifeboat.
"No."
The guard became a wall again.
No.
That was it. My husband had not simply refused to believe me.
He had forbidden everyone else to believe me too.
I stepped back, feeling the deck tilt, the water already splashing around my shoes, the night air filling my lungs like sharp shards.
There were people all around me, so many people, but suddenly I was monstrously alone.
Not the ordinary loneliness of an empty apartment and a silent phone.
Something else. Something absolute. The kind where an entire city can stand beside you, but not one person has been ordered to save you.
"Adrian!" someone shouted. "We’re moving out!"
The lifeboat rocked. Nikki pressed against him and buried her face in his chest. He held her.
Of course he did. Vivian stared ahead, no longer looking at me.
To her, I had become the past, something best left out of a rescue boat.
Kyle sat pale and guilty, but silent. The bag lay at their feet.
My life, my foundation, perhaps my documents and my stolen name, all in a dry place. Me, on the wet, sloping deck.
They began lowering the lifeboat.
I lunged forward. Not with my mind. With my body. Reach it. Grab on. Climb across. Survive. The guard caught me by the shoulders and shoved me back. Not hard at first. I stepped forward again, almost fell to my knees, but got up.
"Don’t touch me!" I screamed in his face.
"I’m his wife! Do you hear me? I’m his wife!"
He stared somewhere past me. He had been ordered not to hear.
"Push her back," Adrian said.
I froze.
The world did not end at once. It did something worse.
It let me hear every syllable. Push her back.
Three words with which my husband signed my death sentence more easily than a restaurant check.
The guard froze too. Even he did. Even a stranger who was paid to follow orders could not believe it for one second.
But Adrian repeated himself, lower and more terrifying.
"Do it."
The guard shoved me.
I do not know whether it was an oar, a hand, a shoulder, the end of some rescue hook.
It all blurred into one brutal motion that sent me flying backward.
I slipped on the wet deck and struck my back against the low rail.
The air burst from my lungs. My clutch flew from my fingers, hit the deck, and sprang open.
The box tumbled out. A little velvet box, absurdly beautiful among the water, grime, and scraps of napkin.
It opened. The test fell onto the deck, and in the red emergency light, I saw the two lines.
Like two slender wounds across the white plastic.