Chapter 2

The forty-mile drive was a blur of sirens that weren't there and a silence that was too loud. It was too late. The doctors at the larger hospital confirmed it with quiet, professional sympathy that felt like an insult. My son was gone.

I drove home with a small, heavy box on the passenger seat. Leo's ashes. The house was quiet when I walked in. Matthew was on the couch, watching TV. Tara was nowhere in sight.

He didn't even look up until I placed the urn on the coffee table between us.

"What's that?" he asked, his tone bored.

"It's Leo," I said, my voice hollow.

He finally looked at me, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. "What kind of sick joke is this, Jen? Did you get him a new toy box?"

"He's dead, Matthew." The words felt like swallowing glass. "He died. Because you gave his medicine to her."

Matthew stared at the urn, then laughed. A short, ugly sound. "Dead? You're unbelievable. You're just being dramatic to get my attention, to punish me for letting Tara stay with us."

He reached out, not with gentleness, but with contempt, and knocked the urn. It tipped, spilling a small mound of gray ash onto the cheap wood of the table.

"Look what you made me do," he said, as if I were the one at fault. "Clean that up. You've been faking this whole tragedy since her father died. You're just jealous."

The sight of my son's remains, desecrated on the table he used to put his sticky hands on, broke something inside me. The grief turned into a cold, hard resolve. I didn't scream. I didn't cry. I just looked at the monster I had married.

He saw the look in my eyes and his face hardened. "Don't you look at me like that. You probably never even loved that kid. You just used him to try and trap me."

The cruelty of his words was absolute. He didn't believe me. He didn't care. He had erased our son from his memory as easily as he'd spilled his ashes.