Chapter 2

The next morning, the house was filled with a false, heavy silence. Mark was in the kitchen, making pancakes for our son, Leo. He was humming that same tune from last night.

"Daddy, where's Mommy?" Leo asked. He was only five, his small voice still full of sleep. He sat at the kitchen table, swinging his dangling feet.

"Mommy had to go away for a little while, buddy," Mark said. He flipped a pancake with a flourish, a perfect, practiced motion. He was a good performer.

"Why?"

"She was very, very tired. She needed to go somewhere quiet to rest."

He placed a pancake shaped like a dinosaur on Leo's plate. Leo' s favorite. A calculated move. A distraction.

"Is she coming back for my birthday?" Leo asked, his eyes wide and serious.

"We'll see, champ. We'll see. Eat up now."

My heart, or what was left of it, ached. He was poisoning Leo' s memory of me, planting the idea that I had abandoned him. That I had just left. The lie was so simple, so cruel.

Later that day, after he dropped Leo off at his parents' house, Mark started cleaning. He wasn't just cleaning, he was erasing me. He went into the bedroom closet and pulled out the shoebox where I kept my most treasured things. Not jewelry or anything valuable. Just small memories. A dried flower from our first date-a lie of a date, I now understood. A ticket stub from a movie Chloe and I saw. A little clay bird Leo made me in preschool, its wing chipped.

He didn't even look at the items. He just dumped the whole box into a large black trash bag.

He walked past the little bookshelf where I kept my favorite novels. He paused, looking at the worn copy of my favorite book, the one my grandmother gave me. Its spine was soft from a hundred readings. He picked it up, opened it, and saw the inscription she had written inside. For a second, I thought he might hesitate.

He didn't. He tore the page out. Then he tore out another. And another. He ripped the book in half, the sound of the spine breaking echoing in the quiet room. He threw the pieces into the trash bag with my other memories. It was a symbolic execution. He wasn't just getting rid of my things; he was destroying any proof that the person I was had ever existed.

I floated there, watching him, and the memories came flooding back, no longer softened by hope or denial. I saw them with a terrible, new clarity.

I remembered the time he "accidentally" tripped me on the stairs, and then blamed me for being clumsy as he helped me up, his grip on my arm painfully tight. I remembered him telling our friends that I was "too emotional" and "prone to exaggeration" whenever I tried to talk about how he treated me. He would smile while he said it, making it sound like an affectionate joke.

The final moments replayed in my mind, sharp and vivid. The argument had started over nothing, over a bill I forgot to pay. His voice got louder, his face twisting into that familiar mask of rage. He backed me into the bathroom. I slipped on a wet spot on the floor from Leo' s bath. My head hit the edge of the tub. The sound was a dull, wet crack. It wasn't just a fall. He had shoved me. He had been yelling, his face inches from mine, and he had pushed me backward. It was that push that sent me off balance. It was that push that killed me.

And now he was telling people I was "resting."

Chloe called that evening. I hovered near Mark as he answered, his voice once again dripping with fake sadness.

"Hey, Chloe... No, she's still not up to talking. The doctor said she needs complete rest. I'm taking care of everything here. Don't you worry."

A lie. Another lie, built on the foundation of a hundred others.

He hung up the phone and looked around the living room. His eyes weren't sad. They were assessing. Like he was measuring the space for new furniture.

I was not a person to him. I was not his wife or the mother of his child. I was a problem that had been solved. I was an empty space he could now fill with whatever he wanted.