Chapter 6
Almost four months had passed since the evening he walked out after her.
My belly had grown round and heavy; there wasn't much time left before I was due.
Noah and Mia had been at their grandmother's for three days.
The house stood empty and echoing, and the doorbell that evening cut through the silence like a knife.
I wasn't expecting anyone—Dominic didn't ring the bell, he had keys.
I went and looked through the peephole—and my fingers closed on the handle on their own.
On the doorstep stood her.
His mistress.
I recognized her at once, though I'd seen her only that one time—in the car under the windows, in the dome light. Young. Polished. Coat hanging open, and beneath it a rounded belly she carried out in front of her like a trophy. She wasn't even trying to hide it. Just the opposite.
"Open up, I know you're home," she said to the closed door. Voice calm, almost bored. "I'm not leaving."
I opened it. Not because I wanted to—but because, half a step past that door, stood the one person in front of whom I didn't have to pretend everything was fine.
"What do you want?"
"To talk. Woman to woman." Her eyes slid past me into the hall, appraising. "How much longer are you going to pretend this is your house?"
"This is my house."
"For now." She smiled and, without waiting for an invitation, stepped over the threshold.
I didn't give ground, and for a second we were too close—close enough that I caught her perfume, heavy, sweet, a stranger in my hall. She went around me the way you go around furniture that's about to be carried out.
"Nice house," she tossed off, studying the walls. "Dominic said you did the renovation. Well—you'll live here a while longer. Out of gratitude."
She walked into the living room like it was hers, ran a finger along the edge of the dresser, paused at our framed photos—me, him, the kids at the beach, three years ago—and gave a slight twist of her lips.
"He told me everything about you," she said, without turning around. "How you cry at night. How you check his phone. How you cling to him with both hands. Men don't leave good wives, you know. They leave ones like you—the ones who turn a home into a prison."
"You came into my home to recite his words back to me?"
"I came to take what's mine." She finally turned to face me. "He rented me an apartment. By the river. We already picked out a crib—last week, together. So don't pretend you've still got something to fight for."
She drove each word in flat, matter-of-fact, like a nail. And the worst part was that I believed her. I knew his handwriting too well.
"Get out," I said quietly.
"I'm carrying his child." She laid a hand on her belly—the same gesture I made, only on her it came out like a challenge.
"A son. And you... you're just occupying a place that stopped being yours a long time ago.
He's coming to me. All that's left is for you to finally understand it and stop making a scene. "
Something jerked inside me—not even pain, a tired, dull recognition. I'd heard this hundreds of times. Only before—from him.
"Did he tell you that himself?" I asked. "That he's leaving?"
"What do you think he's doing at my place three nights a week?" She snorted. "Let him go. Sign whatever needs signing and leave with a little grace. For once in your life, do it like a human being."
"Like a human being," I repeated, and suddenly laughed—short, ugly. "You know what he told me in those exact words? Word for word. About you, by the way, too. That you were nothing, a passing thing. That he'd get it out of his system and come back."
Her smile slipped.
"You're lying." She shook her head. "He wouldn't—he showed me pictures of you. 'Look,' he says, 'sits at home, gone to seed, all she does is cry.' He laughs at you, understand?"
Something in me dropped for a second—not at the news, I was braced for the news, but at how easily she'd laid it out. But I didn't let her see.
"And you know what's funniest of all?" I nodded at her belly, and my voice didn't waver. "Right now you think this baby will keep him. That you'll give birth—and that's it, you're forever. I thought that too. Three times."
"Shut up."
"He'll cross you out too." I looked her straight in the eye, and I almost pitied her—almost. "The way he crossed me out. First it's 'we're a family,' then you'll be washing other women's perfume out of his shirts and pretending you don't notice. You're not the last one. You're just next in line."
That's what broke her. I saw something snap in her face—all the polish, all the condescension fell away in an instant, and what was left was an angry, frightened girl who'd been told a truth she didn't want to hear.
"Who do you think you are..." She lunged at me, and I didn't understand at first what she was doing.
She was aiming for the belly.
My body reacted before my head. I threw up my hands and shoved—both palms, into her shoulders, with everything I had.
She flew backward. Her heel skated across the floor, she flung out her arms—and caught nothing. She went down hard, all her weight, her belly striking the sharp corner of the console table. A dull thud—and she lay there on the floor, one leg twisted awkwardly under her.
Silence.
"Can you hear me?" My voice broke. "Get up. Please, get up."
She didn't get up. She lay there staring at the ceiling, her face white, her lips moving, and it took me a moment to make out what she was whispering—it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
And then I saw the blood. It was spreading beneath her in a dark stain, creeping across the light floor, and I understood—not with my head, with something older and more animal—where that blood was coming from.
"No," I said. "No—no—no."
I dropped to my knees beside her, grabbed the phone, my hands wouldn't obey, I stabbed at the screen, gave the address, a stranger's voice in the earpiece said something calm and terrible, and she clamped a hand around my wrist and looked up at me—no longer with hatred, but with terror, a child's, enormous.
"He's... he's mine..." she breathed. "Do something."
"They're coming. They're already coming. Breathe. Look at me, breathe."
I held her hand until the ambulance came.
The paramedics burst into the hall, edged me aside, bent over her, and one—young, tired eyes—asked without lifting his head: how far along.
I said I didn't know. He said something short to his partner, and from that something short, from the way they hurried, I understood before I heard the words.
"She's losing it," he said quietly, not to me. "Move."
They carried her out on a stretcher. The door slammed behind them. And I was left alone—in the middle of the hall, on my knees, in another woman's blood that was already starting to dry at the edges.
I wanted to get up, wash the floor, wipe it all away, as if erasing the stain could undo what stood behind it. But my legs wouldn't hold me. So I stayed sitting beside it, hugging my knees, watching it darken and cool.
I shoved her. I did. With my palms, both of them, away from me.
There'd been a baby there. Small, not mine, no one's now. And I didn't know where "I was protecting my little girl" ended and "I killed another woman's child" began. It seemed—nowhere. It seemed they were one and the same motion.
The phone buzzed in my hand, and I jumped so hard I nearly dropped it. On the screen: "Dom's Mom." My mother-in-law. I stared at the name until the call cut off, then it started again—and I answered after all, I don't know why.
"Leah? The kids are asleep, I put them down," her voice was ordinary, domestic, from some other world. "Will you pick them up tomorrow, or should they stay a bit longer?"
"Let them... let them stay." I pressed the phone to my ear and squeezed my eyes shut, just so she wouldn't hear my teeth chattering. "Thank you. I'll come tomorrow."
"What's wrong with you? Your voice sounds off."
"Everything's fine. Just tired. Goodnight."
I hung up first. And at once it got even quieter—so quiet I could hear the blood dripping from the corner of the table where I'd smeared it with my palm. I didn't turn on the light. I kept waiting for the phone to ring again and tell me—it's all right. It stayed silent.
And then a key scraped in the lock.
I knew it was him from the hallway—by the way he missed the keyhole, by the way he swore, by the smell that rolled in with him: liquor, cigarettes, another woman's perfume. Dominic. Drunk. And—I understood it the moment he stumbled into the hall—he already knew everything.
"Where is she?" He swayed, grabbed the doorframe. His eyes were bloodshot. "What did you do to her?"
"At the hospital. Dominic, listen—"
"You." He jabbed a finger at me, and the finger shook. "They called me. From the hospital. Said you pushed her. You killed my son."
"She came at me, she was aiming for my belly, I was only defending myself—"
"I was going to leave." He wasn't listening. He waved a hand around the hall, swaying. "Today. To her. To my son. I already had a bag packed, there, in the car." He laughed, and the laugh was worse than a shout. "And you took even that from me. Everything you touch rots."
"Dom, we're having a girl, ours, listen to me just once—"
"Ours?" He stepped toward me. "I had a son. One. And you dumped him on the floor of my own hall."
He was on me in two strides. Grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me so hard my teeth clacked, and I felt the wall against my back. I threw up my elbows, shielding my belly—only my belly, everything else didn't matter.
"Dominic, I'm pregnant, there's a baby inside me, yours—"
"I don't care." He breathed it into my face. "I don't care about your brat. He was mine. A son. And you—"
The blow landed sideways, glancing off my cheekbone—I didn't have time to turn away.
White flared behind my eyes. I slid down the wall, and he loomed over me, huge, alien, and there was nothing left in him—not a drop of the thing I'd held on to for twelve years.
Only a drunk, blunt fury that needed somewhere to pour itself.
"Don't," I pressed into the wall, sliding down it, arms wrapped around my belly. "Dom, please, the baby, our baby—"
"Ours," he mocked. "Same thing from you, over and over. 'Our home,' 'our kids,' 'our family.'" He grabbed a fistful of hair at the back of my head, yanked it back, and I saw his face right above me—red, wet, alien. "There was never any ours. There was only what I put up with. Out of pity."
The second blow I barely felt—my body had switched off part of itself, leaving one task: cover it. I curled into a ball on the floor, knees to my chest, elbows around my belly, and he shouted something above me, and the words blurred, lost their meaning, and only the roar was left.
And then he suddenly went quiet. Stood there. Kicked something—a chair, I think—and left. The bedroom door slammed hard enough to rattle the glass.
The silence came down again, cottony, ringing.
I lay on the floor by the wall, afraid to move. My cheekbone burned. My mouth was salty. I listened for myself—for my little girl, that quiet, warm weight low in me that all these months had been my only proof I was still alive.
And then I felt it.
First warmth. Slow, spreading, where there shouldn't be any. Then—a pulling ache, deep, familiar from two births and all the more terrifying for it. I lowered my hand. Pressed my fingers. Held them up to my eyes.
Blood.
Mine now.
The floor tipped and slid off somewhere sideways.
The phone lay half a yard away, in the dark, its screen dead.
Half a yard. A whole half a yard. I crawled to it, leaving a warm trail behind me, and kept repeating with silent lips, as if it could hold on: only not her, only not her, only not my little girl...
The screen flared under my finger and went dark again.
And then everything else went dark too.