Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
FALLON
Sunday unfolds with the eerie normalcy I've learned to recognize as dangerous.
Daniel brings me coffee in the morning—two sugars, splash of cream, exactly how I take it—and we settle into separate corners of the living room.
Him with his case files spread across the coffee table, me with student essays bleeding red ink across my lap.
The silence should feel comfortable. Companionable, even. Two professionals working side by side on a lazy Sunday afternoon, existing in the same space without friction.
Instead, my skin crawls with each passing hour.
Each moment of peace feels borrowed, stolen, temporary.
Like waiting for a storm I can see gathering on the horizon but can't outrun.
The calm before Daniel's violence is always worse than the violence itself—the anticipation, the hypervigilance, the constant monitoring of his mood through subtle shifts in breathing patterns and body language.
I keep my head down, focus on marking Shelby Martin's essay on The Great Gatsby.
She's written something insightful about Daisy's trapped existence, about how wealth and marriage became her beautiful prison.
My pen hovers over a particularly astute observation about complicity and survival, and I have to close my eyes for a moment.
Daniel shifts on the couch. I tense automatically, pen frozen mid-stroke.
But he just turns a page in his case file. Reaches for his water glass. Returns to reading.
I force myself to breathe again. To focus on Shelby's essay, on anything except the man ten feet away who holds my entire existence in his carefully manicured hands.
The hours crawl past. I grade papers. Daniel reviews evidence.
The television plays quietly in the background—some political news show he likes, droning voices discussing policy and corruption.
The afternoon light shifts across the hardwood floors, golden and warm and completely at odds with the cold knot of dread in my stomach.
By five o'clock, I can't sit still anymore. I gather the essays into a neat stack, set them on the side table. "I should start dinner."
Daniel glances up, and for a moment something flickers in his eyes. Assessment. Calculation. Then he smiles, and it almost reaches his eyes. Almost. "Sounds good, baby. Whatever you feel like making."
The casual permission feels like a trap. Like he's giving me rope to hang myself with later.
I escape to the kitchen and lose myself in the familiar ritual of cooking.
Roasted chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, green beans with almonds—Daniel's favorite meal, prepared exactly how he likes it.
I measure and chop and season with the same focused attention I give to grading essays, grateful for a task that keeps my hands busy and my mind occupied.
The chicken skin crisps to golden perfection. The potatoes whip into smooth, creamy clouds. The green beans snap between my fingers with satisfying precision. I arrange everything on our wedding china—the Lenox pattern his mother selected, because of course I didn't get a say in that either.
We sit at the dining table and talk about nothing. His upcoming court cases. The weather. Whether we should repaint the guest bedroom. Surface-level conversation that skates over the void beneath our marriage, never acknowledging the darkness we both know lives there.
Daniel compliments the chicken. I thank him. He asks about my students. I give carefully edited responses that highlight my dedication to the job he "allows" me to have. We exist in this performance of normalcy, playing our roles with practiced precision.
Everything feels so empty now. More than ever.
Even on what I'd call a "good day"—and today technically qualifies as one—I'm suffocating.
Pretending to like this man—this worst person I know—makes my chest tight, my smile plastic, my words hollow.
I move through the motions of being Mrs. Daniel Reid, dutiful wife and perfect accessory, while everything inside me screams.
I watch him cut his chicken into precise, methodical pieces.
Watch him chew with careful deliberation, never speaking with his mouth full, always the picture of refined civility.
This is the man San Diego sees—the charismatic District Attorney, the devoted husband, the public servant fighting for justice.
They have no idea what he becomes behind closed doors. What he's capable of when no one's watching except me.
In moments of silence—while he refills his water glass, while I clear our plates—my mind wanders back to last night. To Kade.
Not just how he made me feel in that dark room—though God, I can still feel his hands on my skin, his mouth against mine, the desperate way we kissed like we were starving.
But also how he watched me all night at that fundraiser.
How his eyes followed me across the ballroom with an intensity that should have frightened me but instead made me feel seen.
Important. Like I meant something to him beyond just a body to touch in the dark.
The way he looked at me when Daniel's hand got too tight on my waist. The silent question in his dark eyes: Are you okay?
When was the last time someone asked me that? When was the last time anyone noticed I might not be?
Which is crazy. Has to be.
We haven't known each other long, and I'm married.
Pregnant. He knows that. This is just lust for him—physical attraction and forbidden temptation and eighteen-year-old hormones that haven't learned the difference between wanting something and actually caring about someone.
He probably looks at all his teachers that way.
Probably kisses girls in dark rooms every weekend, collects stolen moments like other boys collect baseball cards.
It has to be just that. Anything else is too dangerous to consider.
I finish the dishes while Daniel returns to the living room, the sound of the television resuming. I wipe down the counters with meticulous care, making sure every surface gleams. Making sure there's nothing he can criticize later, no excuse for his hands to find me in anger.
The sky outside the kitchen window darkens from gold to purple to black.
I watch the neighborhood lights flicker on one by one, golden squares of warmth in other people's homes.
Normal families having normal Sunday evenings.
Parents and children and laughter and lives that don't require this constant vigilance.
I used to be normal. Used to live in a world where Sundays meant lazy mornings and good books and calls home to Nebraska. Where the biggest stress in my life was meeting a grading deadline or preparing a new lesson plan.
That woman feels like fiction now. A character I read about once in a novel I can barely remember.
I walk into Daniel's office around ten, finding him hunched over his laptop, the amber glow of his desk lamp casting shadows across his face. He doesn't look up when I enter. Doesn't acknowledge my presence at all, just continues scrolling through whatever document has his attention.
I cross to him and bend down, pressing a kiss to his cheek that feels like swallowing glass. "I'm going to bed. Do you need anything?"
My eyes catch the tumbler beside his laptop—scotch, half-empty. He's drinking. That observation settles like ice in my stomach, spreading cold fingers of dread through my chest.
Daniel drinking means an unpredictable Daniel. Means the careful control he maintains over his temper loosens. Means the mask slips and the demon underneath gets hungry.
"No, I'm good." His words slur slightly at the edges, confirming my worst fears. "Goodnight, baby."
The endearment makes my skin crawl, but I hold the cringe in. Force my face into something resembling warmth, the expression I've perfected over three years of this hell. "Okay. Goodnight, baby."
I walk out of the room before he can see the revulsion I'm barely containing. Before the mask cracks and he sees what I really think of him.
In the bathroom, I go through my night routine with mechanical precision. Face washed until my skin feels tight and clean. Teeth brushed for exactly two minutes, because anything less feels like losing control over the few things I still command.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror and barely recognize the woman looking back. When did I get so good at hiding? When did my face learn to hold this careful blankness, this neutral expression that gives nothing away?
I crawl into bed and try to sleep, pulling the covers up to my chin like they might protect me from anything.
Like fabric and thread could shield me from Daniel's hands when he decides I need correcting.
When the scotch makes him mean and the stress of his cases makes him violent and I become the convenient target for everything wrong in his perfect life.
I press my hand to my stomach and close my eyes. Try to pray to a God I'm not sure listens anymore. Please. Please let him pass out drunk. Please let tonight be one of the nights he's too gone to remember I exist.
I lie there in the dark, covers pulled tight, and wait.
The clock on the nightstand glows 10:47. Then 11:03. Then 11:28.
My eyes drift closed despite the anxiety. Exhaustion wins out over fear, pulling me down into uneasy sleep.
—
Rough hands fumble with my sleep shorts and panties, jerking me from unconsciousness with violent suddenness.
It takes me a second to get my bearings, to realize it's Daniel, but the next thing I know, fingers shove inside me and pain explodes through my body. He's rough and I'm not wet—not even close—and it hurts so bad tears spring immediately to my eyes, hot and helpless.
I cry out and try to push him away, hands scrambling against his chest. "Please—"
"Be fucking still."
His weight comes down on me, pinning me to the bed, holding me in place with casual brutality as he keeps roughly thrusting his fingers inside me. The pain is searing, tearing, wrong in every way. Like being ripped open from the inside, tissue tearing where there should be gentleness.
"Please, Daniel, it hurts—"
"Shut up."
The words slur, drunk and vicious as he presses his mouth to mine, expecting me to fall in line, to submit like I always do.
His breath reeks of scotch and something rotten underneath.
But I can't. Not tonight. Not after feeling what it's like to be touched with gentleness, with care, with something that wasn't ownership and violation.
Not after Kade's hands showed me the difference.
I try to push him off again, managing to twist away enough that his fingers slide out. The relief lasts half a second, just long enough for hope to flicker.
Then he sits up on his knees and slaps me.
The impact snaps my head sideways, the crack echoing through the bedroom. Stars explode across my vision—white and bright and disorienting. I taste copper. My cheek burns like fire.
I roll instinctively, trying to get away, self-preservation overriding thought. I fall off the bed and crash onto the floor, my arm taking the brunt of the fall. Pain sears through my elbow where it connects with hardwood, sharp and immediate and eclipsing everything else.
Even drunk, it doesn't take him long before he's looming over me again, climbing off the bed with the unsteady grace of someone three drinks past rational.
"Your most important fucking job is to take care of your husband.
" His voice drips venom and alcohol, words bleeding together at the edges.
"And that includes cooking for me, cleaning the house, and fucking me when I want that.
You're a pathetic excuse for a wife. Never want to spread those legs for me.
Do you not love me? Not want to have sex with me? "
I don't answer. Can't form words past the terror closing my throat like hands. My mind screams responses—You're raping me. This isn't sex. I hate you—but nothing makes it past my lips except small, wounded sounds.
After a few minutes of silence, he kicks me in the stomach.
The pain is searing, knocking all the breath from my lungs in one violent expulsion. I gasp uselessly, mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning in air that won't come. My hands clutch my belly automatically, protecting, even as agony radiates through my core.
"I asked you a fucking question, useless bitch."
I can't breathe, much less talk. Even if I knew what to say. Even if words existed that would satisfy his drunken rage and make him stop.
So he kicks me again.
The second impact lands in the same spot, and I feel something shift inside me. Something wrong. Something that shouldn't move that way. The pain is different this time—deeper, sharper, laced with a wrongness that transcends physical hurt.
Then he's on me, holding my arms down and climbing between my legs while he fumbles with his pants, pulling his dick out. I start squirming, twisting my lower body, trying to kick him away with whatever strength I have left. My legs flail uselessly, connecting with nothing but air.
He lets go of my arms.
For a second, I feel like maybe he's giving up. Maybe the alcohol has made him too uncoordinated. Maybe—
His fist connects with the side of my head and pain explodes through my skull like a bomb detonating inside my brain. I see stars—actual stars, bright white against sudden darkness. My vision starts to fade around the edges, tunnelling down to a pinpoint of awareness.
He pushes into me as the world tilts sideways.
"Bitches should learn what they’re good for and shut their mouth," he grunts in my ear as he thrusts, his voice distant and distorted like I'm hearing it underwater.
Then the world goes black.