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Something warm brushed against my leg. It was Toto.
For a moment I was lost. I hadn't brought him out with me today.
Because I couldn't have children, I had long since cherished him like my own flesh and blood.
Every night I held him close, and every hurt I carried I only dared say out loud to him.
Even when he always wanted to follow me into the water, I stopped him every single time, terrified he couldn't survive the dangers of the deep.
But maybe it was worry for me. He always slipped down into the water after me anyway.
So after a while, I simply stopped bringing him out at all.
Daniel gave the little dog a cold glance, his voice cruel to the core:
"We left that dog with you on purpose."
"There's a tracker in his chip. Every time you went into the water, every search you made, we saw all of it, clear as day."
"We kept him around just to drag you back out of the danger zones. Just to keep you alive."
I was already trembling all over, wracked by the old diving illness.
The instant I heard those words, my chest went tight, squeezed again and again as if a crushing pressure of water had ground down on it.
The companionship I'd treated as my salvation had been nothing but their planted spy.
The pressure of the deep left even me riddled with a lifetime of ailments. What chance did a small dog have.
For their own peace of mind, they had thrown away everything of mine without a second thought.
My sister cradled their son, her voice gentle:
"He keeps you company and helps us keep an eye on you. What a bargain."
Black spots swam across my vision, and the ringing in my ears grew worse.
In those moments in the deep when the water pressure choked the breath out of me, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of him waiting for me on the shore.
That was the only reason I could force down the blood rising in my throat and fight my way back with everything I had.
He was the one light I had in all that despair.
But in their eyes, that light was just a cost-effective tool.
Daniel looked at my bloodless face, and his voice softened a little:
"I know you always treated him like your own child. But an animal is still just an animal."
"Now that Kayla and I don't have to hide from you anymore, our son can call you more than just Auntie."
"I'll have him call you his godmother. Consider it one of your wishes granted."
Beside him, Mom and Dad chimed in:
"That's right. A child to hold onto beats clinging to a dog every day."
"We're only doing this for your own good. Stop being so ungrateful."
The fury burned off some of the cold in me.
I fixed my eyes on the child in their arms, and five years of swallowed grief finally shattered.
I lunged straight up to Daniel and my sister, my voice shrill:
"Who wants your charity? Weren't you celebrating his first time in the water?"
"Then remember this. From now on, every single time he goes in, I'll be right there beside him."
"You like faking deaths so much? Then I'll let him try it too!"
Mom's hand flew up and slapped me hard, the blow knocking my head to the side.
"You are out of your mind!"
"Threatening a child. With a heart that vicious, no wonder you can't have any of your own!"
My cheek burned, and a thick, bloody taste surged up my throat until I nearly retched.
I forced it down and made myself speak:
"Daniel, do you really not know why I can't have children?"
His eyes flickered and stalled. Then he deliberately looked away, his tone indifferent:
"The past doesn't matter. Taking it out on a child is wrong, plain and simple."
The sealed-off past came flooding back, and the pain came with it.
That year the sea wind was bitter, the waves violent and merciless.
When I saw Daniel drowning, sinking, I threw myself into the deep without a thought for my own safety.
The churning undertow slammed into my lower belly, and a sharp, tearing pain swept through my whole body in an instant.
My arms and legs were already stiff and numb with cold, but I looked at Daniel's unconscious face against my chest.
I bore the ripping pain and shoved him toward the shore with every last bit of strength I had, then sank into the water, struggling for my own life.
I scraped back my life by sheer luck, but it left me with an illness I'd carry forever.
Chronic abdominal pain, constant frailty, and my right to ever be a mother gone for good.
Back then, lying weak in the hospital bed, I'd joked with him:
"Daniel, I can never have children now. Are you going to find someone else to give you one?"
He'd soothed me then, gentle, every word certain:
"As long as you're safe, having children or not was never important to me."
Now the joke had come true. He really had found someone else to have a child.
He'd long forgotten that rescue and the price I paid for it, had even brushed away all my pain and all my regret as if it were nothing.
Letting the whole world slander and smear me, watching my own family berate and corner me, looking on cold-eyed as I fell into a bottomless abyss.
