Chapter 34 Eden
Eden
ONE YEAR AGO
The windshield wipers are fighting a losing war against the deluge, screeching across the glass with a rhythm that claws directly into the migraine throbbing behind my eyes.
Outside, the world has dissolved into a blurry, greyscale smear.
But inside, the cabin is a suffocating trap of damp wool, red wine, and the cloying, chemical rot of a vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
“Everyone loved the dip you made, babe,” Matthew says over the low hum of the radio and the tapping of his fingernails against the passenger window.
I catch sight of him in my peripheral vision, a perfectly curated smile playing on his lips.
“Seriously. Janice actually asked for the recipe. You were the star of the night. You really charmed them.”
My stomach gives a watery lurch, bile climbing the back of my throat like a rising tide, because I know how that smile always ends.
I shift my grip on the wheel, casually—carefully—tugging the left sleeve of my sweater down, creating a flimsy wool barrier over the ugly, purple-black bloom on my wrist from last Tuesday.
“Thank you,” I say politely, stretching my lips into something that’s more like a grimace frozen in rigor mortis than an actual smile.
Don’t mess up. Just get us home. Don’t let the mask slip. Do not give him a reason.
“I’m serious,” he continues. He shifts in his seat, turning his body toward me. “You were magnetic tonight. Did you see the way your sister was looking at you? Pure jealousy. She knows she can’t compete.”
He reaches out, his hand drifting from the window to rest heavy and hot on the nape of my neck, fingers toying with the fine hairs there.
“It makes me look good, having you on my arm,” he murmurs, his thumb tracing the tension. “My beautiful, perfect trophy. You made me very proud tonight, babe. We’re quite the team, aren’t we?”
“We are,” I manage to choke out, my eyes locked on the rain-slicked road. “I’m glad you had a good ti—”
The whole chassis jolts as we slam over a pothole deep enough to swallow a coffin.
The sound is sickening—metal grinding on stone, a bone-jarring impact that reverberates straight up my spine and snaps my teeth together.
The car lurches to the left, tires screaming a high, desperate wail against the wet asphalt for a heart-stopping, gravity-defying second before finding purchase again.
The tapping on the window stops. Instantly. His hand vanishes from my neck. The sound and oxygen is all-but sucked right out of the cabin, replaced by a pressure so intense it feels like the roof is crushing down on my skull.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I work all week,” he sighs. “I break my back for us. I’m exhausted.
We’ve been at your stupid sister’s party all damn night, pretending to eat that dry quiche and smile at people I hate, and now.
..” He turns his head slowly, the doting boyfriend mask sloughing off completely.
“...and now you can’t even drive us home smoothly? ”
A cold wash of shame prickles over my skin, tightening my throat until it feels like I’m swallowing glass.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer, the apology spilling out on a reflex arc I can’t seem to sever. “It’s just—it’s really dark, Matthew. I didn’t see it, and I’m tired, and—”
“Don’t make excuses,” he cuts in. “It’s unattractive.”
I snap my mouth shut and bite down on the inside of my cheek, until a faint sheen of iron coats my tongue.
“Are you going to sulk now?” he asks mockingly.
“I’m not sulking. I’m focusing on the road,” I say, forcing the words through the constriction in my chest. “The visibility is really bad, Matthew.”
“There you go again,” he sighs, picking a piece of invisible lint off his trousers.
“Deflecting. I’m trying to have a mature conversation about safety—about how you put us in danger because you weren’t paying attention—and you’re making it about the weather.
”He shakes his head. “You’re so sensitive lately. It’s exhausting.”
“I just hit a pothole,” I plead, the steering wheel groaning under my grip. “It happens.”
“It happens to you,” he corrects gently. “Because your head is always in the clouds. You’re all over the place.”
He brushes his sleeve vigorously, nose wrinkling as he sniffs the air. “And God, the car stinks. It smells like ammonia. Have you been looking after the cat properly?”
“Vesper doesn’t… she’s clean,” I say. “I cleaned the box this morning.”
“She’s a shedding, neurotic mess,” he counters, inspecting his fingertips as if checking for contamination. “I don’t know why we keep her. She scratches the furniture, she stares at me like she’s possessed, and honestly? It’s unhygienic.”
I swallow against the bile at the back of my tongue, my eyes burning. “She’s your cat, Matthew.”
“I know,” he says, and he sounds so sad for me. “But she likes you more, doesn’t she?”
I stare at the wipers slashing back and forth, fighting the urge to sob.
It wasn’t always like this. God, the first year feels like a fever dream now, a hallucination I can’t quite wake up from.
I remember thinking he was just… intense.
I thought he was a whirlwind, a force of nature, and I mistook the turbulence for passion.
I used to tell my friends he was ‘a lot,’ but I said it with a smile, like it was charming.
I used to think it was so sweet, so endearing, when he’d perform those random acts of service—like the time he insisted on carrying the neighbor’s shopping bags until he inevitably dropped them, scattering oranges down the stairs.
Back then, I told myself his apology, his shaking hands, his spiraling anxiety was proof of his heart—that he cared too much.
But recently, the lens has shifted, revealing the cracks in the film.
It was never about helping. It was a performance. He needed the audience. He needed to be the ‘Good Man’ so badly that he made a scene of it, forcing me to comfort him about his mistake until I ended up carrying the heavy bags myself just to make the monologue stop.
When did that line blur? When did the ‘Good Man’ start rotting from the inside out?
Maybe it was the dinner party last Christmas at my parents house.
I was telling a story, and everyone was laughing.
All I felt was warmth and happiness until it was replaced by his hand the small of my back, pressing hard enough to bruise, grinding against my spine while he offered that perfect, porcelain smile.
“You’re talking too much, babe,” he’d whispered against my ear. “You’re being loud. It’s embarrassing.”
“Look at you,” he sneers, gesturing at my trembling hands. “Curling in on yourself. acting like I’m some kind of monster because of something you did. You love this, don't you? Making me out to be the bad guy? You think you’re such a victim!”
“I don’t think I’m the victim!”
The scream rips out of my throat before I can stop it, and then, his hand connects with my face.
My ear rings with a high-pitched whine drowning out the rain, and the taste of blood floods my mouth instantly. My cheekbone feels like it’s been turned to dust, throbbing with a heat that sears all the way down to my neck.
For a second, the world is just grey static and pain.
“Don't,” he says calmly. “Don't you ever shout at me.”
The burning tears begin to cascade, tracking through the makeup on my cheeks, dripping off my chin to leave dark, salty starbursts on the front of my coat. I hate them. I hate that I’m crying. It feels like just another thing I’m doing wrong.
I lift my foot off the accelerator, reaching for the indicator.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I can’t,” I gasp, my breath hitching in a wet, ugly sob. “I can’t drive like this, Matthew. I’m pulling over.”
He lunges across the center console, his hand slamming over mine on the wheel. He yanks it hard to the right, forcing the nose of the car back toward the center line.
Panic flares, wild and hot in my chest, my fingers going numb with fear.
“Let go!” I scream, yanking the wheel back, trying to wrestle control from him.
The tires scream.
The back end kicks out.
The world outside the window tilts on its axis, the headlights sweeping wildly across the wet trees.
There’s a flash of silver guardrail, and then a sound that eats the world—metal screeching on metal, the sickening crunch of a soda can being crushed by a giant’s fist, the explosion of safety glass turning into a storm of diamonds.
The ceiling becomes the floor as I’m tossed like a ragdoll in a dryer, over and over, until everything goes black.
******
I don’t know how much time has passed. Seconds? Hours? Time feels irrelevant right now.
The screaming of the tires and the shouting is gone—replaced by the ticking of a cooling engine, and the relentless, indifferent drumming of the rain against the exposed metal belly of the chassis.
There’s an overwhelming weight slicing diagonally across my chest, digging in until it meets bone. I try to move, but I’m paralyzed by the geometry of the crash. Gravity has turned traitor. I’m suspended by a nylon noose, dangling like meat in a butcher’s window.
Blood’s pooling in my skull, a heavy, hydraulic pressure that feels like it’s trying to push my eyes out of their sockets. Something warm and viscous is leaking into my hairline, tracking a slow, wet path from chin to nose to forehead.
Breathe. Just breathe.
But the second I try, a line of white-hot fire wakes up across my stomach, and a gargled cry wretches out of me.
I look down—or up, through the twisted ruin of the cabin—and the nausea hits me so hard, the already-dark world greys out at the edges.
The dashboard has buckled. A piece of jagged, serrated plastic has shorn through the dark like a shark’s tooth, tearing through my coat, through my shirt, and into me. I’ve been unzipped. The pain is absolute, a screaming, blinding thing that makes my vision flicker like a dying lightbulb.
I try to look closer, and a scream dies in my throat, choked off by pure horror.
Through the raw, ragged lips of the wound around the plastic, there’s a pulse of, glistening pink.
Oh God. Oh God.
I’m not just hurt; I’ve been unzipped.
As my hands fly to my stomach, fingers slipping on the hot, bloodied flesh in a desperate attempt to hold my own organs inside myself, my gaze catches on the passenger seat.
Matthew’s dangling too, his expensive sweater dark with liquid that definitely isn’t rain. His eyes are wide, white-rimmed marbles in the gloom, darting frantically around the wreckage before locking onto me.
“Eden, I’m stuck.” He coughs, a spray of red misting the shattered glass of the window.
He tries to reach for the buckle, but his arms don't follow the command.
His hands are dangling at wrong, sickening angles, the wrists shattered from bracing against the dashboard on impact.
He thrashes, but his hands just flop uselessly against his chest like dead weights.
“My hands,” he wheezes. “I can’t use my hands. Eden, you have to do it. You have to press the button. Help me.”
Muscle memory tells me to reach for him. Matthew needs; I provide. But when I shift, the movement tears a scream from my throat.
“I can’t,” I gasp, the words bubbling up through the bloodied tide in my mouth. “Matthew, I’m… I’m hurt.”
“Eden, focus!” he snaps. “I can’t breathe. Just push the button! Do something!”
I am.
For years, I’ve cut him down. I’ve smoothed his edges, absorbed his anger, and broken my own bones to keep him whole. I’ve been his shock absorber, his audience, and his replacement mother. I’ve poured myself into the bottomless pit of his need until there was nothing left of me but a husk.
And now, as I measure the blood in my lap against the entitlement in his eyes. Something inside me finally snaps—the only thing in this car that breaks cleanly.
My hand moves—but not to him—to my own hip, my blood-slicked fingers fumbling blindly for the release button of my seatbelt.
“What are you doing?” he demands. “Eden? Eden!”
My thumb finds the button, and in one short, brutal fall, I slam onto the roof. The impact sends a white-hot supernova through my nerves, shattering my vision into a kaleidoscope of static and agony. A scream tears its way out of my throat, raw and animalistic, but I bite it back.
I lie there for a second, gasping in the broken glass.
Above me, Matthew thrashes in his harness, dangling like a pendulum, his face purple with the pressure. “Push the button! I can’t do it! Just reach up and push the button!”
That buckle’s too far away. My right hand is glued to my stomach, holding my insides in. My left hand’s dug into the carpet of shattered glass, propping me up.
If I lift my left arm—if I scream through the agony of twisting my torso and reach up—I could snap him loose.
But then he’d fall. He’d drop directly onto me. His weight would slam into my open stomach, crushing me.
I look at his face—purple with exertion, expecting me to cushion his fall just like I’ve cushioned every other blow in his life. He wants me to break his fall with my own broken body.
“No,” I whisper.
“Don't you dare!” He bellows as best as he can through his broken insides. “You selfish bitch! Come back here! Help me!”
Teeth gritted against the agony, I force my limbs to cooperate, slithering through the wreckage.
Shards of pulverized safety glass grind into my knees, a carpet of diamond-dust biting through denim and skin.
The twisted metal of the dashboard scrapes against my shoulder, seeking purchase.
But I don’t twist. I can’t. I keep my body rigid, a trembling statue of agony, hauling myself inch by excruciating inch toward the broken window where the rain’s pouring in.
“Eden! Get back here!”
The shattered window frame bites into my palms, slicing fresh, hot lines of red into my skin. But I push through. With one final, gasping heave that feels like it tears me in half, I tumble out of the metal coffin and into the wet, cold embrace of the gasoline-and-rain soaked mud.
I drag myself a few feet away, collapsing into the sodden grass, the torrential rain washing the blood from my eyes.
The world’s narrowing. The darkness at the edges of my vision is creeping in, soft and welcoming—a shutter closing on a lens.
“You did this!”
Matthew’s voice is shrill, echoing from the hollow, upturned belly of the car. It sounds frantic now. Closer to hysteria. The sound of a man who’s lost his audience.
“Eden! Do you hear me? This is your fault! Look at what you’ve done!”
My eyes roll back as the cold seeps into my bones, numbing the white-hot fire in my stomach. The last thing I hear isn’t the rain, or the wind, or the ominous, crackling hiss starting to spark from the engine.
It’s him. It’s always been him.
“This is your fucking fault…”