Chapter 2

The drive back to our small town, to the grand but decaying Cole mansion, was silent.

Ethan drove, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

I tried to talk to him, to make him see.

"Ethan, please. You know me. I would never hurt a child."

He didn't answer. He just stared straight ahead.

The accusation, the betrayal, it was a living thing in the car with us.

A few weeks later, my labor started. Noah. My son.

The birth was difficult, but holding him, so small, so perfect, I felt a flicker of hope.

Maybe Noah could bridge this chasm between Ethan and me.

Ethan was distant during the birth, almost clinical.

When he held Noah, his face was unreadable.

Olivia visited the hospital. She cooed over Noah, her eyes lingering on him with an intensity that chilled me.

She spoke to Ethan in hushed tones in the hallway. I couldn't hear the words, but I saw Ethan' s face tighten.

Noah developed a fever a week after we brought him home.

I called the doctor. He said to monitor him, to bring him in if it worsened.

It worsened. Rapidly.

I begged Ethan to rush him to the hospital.

"He's just got a little bug, Sarah," Ethan said, his voice strangely calm. "Olivia said Daisy used to get these all the time."

"He's burning up, Ethan! He can barely breathe!"

Olivia was there, always there now, a shadow in our home.

She suggested a home remedy, something her grandmother used.

"It's better than those harsh hospital drugs," she said, smiling faintly at me.

Ethan agreed. He seemed to hang on her every word.

I fought them, pleaded, but Ethan blocked the doorway.

"We're trying this first, Sarah. Olivia knows about these things."

Noah' s breathing grew shallower. His small body convulsed.

I screamed for Ethan to do something, to call an ambulance.

He finally relented, but it was too late.

My son, Noah, died in my arms on the way to the hospital.

The doctors said it was a severe, aggressive infection. They said if we' d brought him in sooner...

Ethan showed no grief. Just a grim sort of satisfaction.

Olivia was the one who cried, clinging to Ethan, saying how it brought back the pain of losing Daisy.

Then came the demand.

A few days after Noah' s funeral, a funeral I barely remember through my haze of grief, Olivia and Ethan confronted me.

Olivia, pale and tragic, claimed she now suffered from secondary infertility, a complication from Daisy' s birth. She couldn't have more children.

"An eye for an eye, Sarah," Ethan said, his voice like ice.

My blood ran cold.

"You took a child," Olivia whispered, her eyes gleaming. "Now you will give one back."

They wanted me to carry a child for them.

For Olivia.

Using Ethan' s sperm and a donor egg.

"It's your penance," Ethan stated. "For Daisy. For Noah."

He was blaming me for Noah too. For not trusting Olivia' s "remedy."

The horror of it was a physical blow.

I refused. I screamed. I wept.

Ethan grabbed my arms, his fingers digging in like vices.

"You will do this, Sarah. Or I'll make sure everyone in this town knows what kind of mother you really are. The kind that lets her son die. The kind that let Daisy drown."

His family owned the town. Their influence was everywhere.

He could destroy what little I had left. My name. My sanity.

The grief for Noah was a raw, open wound. The thought of carrying another child, not mine, for them... it was unthinkable.

But Ethan' s threat, his cold certainty, broke something inside me.

I was trapped. Utterly and completely.