Chapter 3 #3
I looked at him and, for the first time, could not find a single living thread inside me still reaching for him. All that remained was a hollow, ringing fury, so pure that I stopped trembling.
"Sooner?" I repeated. "When, exactly? While you were kissing her? While your mother was discussing my signatures? While you let that entire room applaud your pregnant mistress? Pick a convenient opening in your calendar, Mr. Mercer. I’ll schedule my humiliation."
He stepped toward me.
"The life jacket."
"No."
The word came out quietly, but it was the first true word I had spoken in my entire marriage.
No. Not “all right.” Not “whatever you say.” Not “I understand.” No.
Adrian looked as if he had never expected me to know how to say it.
His hand twitched toward the life jacket, but I stepped back.
The deck listed more sharply, and behind us the crowd near the lifeboats erupted in screams. One of the guards shouted:
"Mr. Mercer, hurry!"
Nikki began to cry, ugly and furious now.
"Adrian, please! I don’t want to die because of her!"
Because of me. Wonderful. I was no longer a wife, a mother, or a human being, but an obstacle standing between his mistress and survival.
Adrian glanced at the lifeboat, then the life jacket, then my stomach, as if calculating probability, cost, consequences.
And in that calculation, I saw my final death in his eyes.
Not physical. Not yet. Another kind. In his mind, I had already become an acceptable loss.
"Lana, don’t force me," he said.
And that was when the fear came back. Not for myself.
For my baby. Because a man who tells a woman carrying his child, Don’t force me, has already given himself permission to do anything.
I took another step back. Behind me were the wet rail, the wind, the black water below, screams, and sirens in the distance, unless I only imagined them.
"Don’t come any closer," I said. "Do you hear me? Don’t you dare."
His face became a stranger’s. Beautiful, terrifying, almost lifeless.
"You don’t understand what you’re doing."
"For the first time in my life, I do."
Nikki shrieked:
"Adrian!"
And Adrian lunged. Not like a husband. Not like a father. Like a man whose property had defied him. His fingers closed around the edge of the life jacket. I yanked it toward me, the fabric burning my palms as the straps lashed my wrist.
"Let go!" I screamed. "Adrian, let go!"
"Don’t be a fool!" His voice cut through the noise.
"She needs it more!"
"And I don’t need to live?"
"Stop being dramatic!"
He pulled harder, and I cried out when a plastic buckle struck my knuckles.
For one second, we were so close I could see droplets of water on his lashes, the dark scratch on his cheekbone, the vein pounding wildly at his temple.
I knew that face better than my own. I had kissed it, waited for it, forgiven it, invented excuses for it when he came home late, when he grew cold, when he walked into the shower after I cried as if he needed to wash away someone else’s weakness.
And now that face loomed over me, neither loving nor doubting nor even human, distilled into a single desire: take.
"I’m asking one last time," he said through clenched teeth. "Give me the life jacket."
"And I’m telling you one last time. I’m pregnant."
He froze so close I felt his breath against my lips. Once, that breath had made my knees go weak. Now I wanted to spit in his face.
"Prove it," he said.
Prove it.
The word was so monstrous I did not understand it at first. Prove a pregnancy on a sinking yacht.
Prove your right to breathe. Prove that your life is worth as much as the life of a woman in a gold dress.
Prove it to the man who should have been the first to stand between you and death.
Something cracked deep inside me, not a bone, not my heart, but something deeper, where my faith in a just ending had lived.
I let go of the life jacket with one hand and slapped him.
Not hard. Not gracefully. My palm simply found his cheek.
The sound was dry, almost small, but Adrian went rigid.
Nikki gasped behind him. Kyle swore. I watched the red mark bloom on my husband’s face and thought: there.
At last. The first honest gift I had given him in three years.
"That’s a down payment," I said. "For everything I’m still going to prove."
Then the yacht lurched violently to one side.
It did not rock or shudder. It heeled over like an enormous wounded body beginning to collapse.
People tumbled across the deck. Someone screamed as they struck a bench.
I was thrown forward, straight into Adrian, and he caught my shoulder by instinct.
For one second, his hand held me. For one second, I was in his power again, and that power could have become salvation.
He could have pulled me close. Shielded me.
Said, “Hold on.” He could have chosen. Nikki screamed as she fell by the rail.
Adrian turned his head toward her. His fingers loosened on my shoulder.
I understood before I fell.
Understood everything.
He did not merely let me go.
He went to her.