My Husband Blew Up My Mother's Grave to Keep His Mistress Safe

The stitches in my side still pulled when I walked, eleven days after the surgery, but I made myself walk anyway. Dr. Kim said light movement was good for healing. I moved through the house like a ghost checking on its own funeral, one hand pressed flat against the bandage under my shirt.

I found Cassius in the sunroom. He was on his knees beside the chaise, tucking a cashmere throw around Katalina's legs. Her belly was round now, seven months maybe, stretching the silk of her robe. He brushed her hair back from her face and murmured something I couldn't hear, and she laughed softly, like a bell.

I used to love that sunroom. I picked the tile myself.

"Cassius," I said. "Can I lie down on the sofa? My back—"

He didn't even turn all the way around. "Don't make a scene in front of Katalina, Audrey. She's stressed enough."

I stood there a second longer than I needed to. Then I went back upstairs, one hand on the railing, one hand on my side, and sat on the edge of the bed we used to share. I pressed my palm against the raised line of the scar and thought about the kidney that used to be mine, working now inside someone else's body, keeping someone else's heart beating.

Three mornings later, I found Mochi on the kitchen floor.

He was curled the way he curled when he slept in the sun, except the sun wasn't out yet, and he didn't move when I said his name. I knelt down. His fur was still soft. I made a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.

"Cassius!" Katalina's voice, from the doorway, high and wet with tears. "Cassius, come quick—she was so rough with him last week, I saw it, I didn't want to say anything, I was scared—"

He came down the stairs two at a time. He looked at the cat. He looked at me. He didn't ask me a single question.

"What did you do," he said. Not a question. A verdict.

"Cassius, I would never—"

"Get up." His hand closed around my arm, right above the bandage, and I bit down on a cry.

He pulled me through the house, down the hall, into the little cedar sauna off the pool room, the one we'd installed the year before Wesley was born. He shoved me inside and I heard the lock click from the outside.

The heat hit first, then the panic. I pounded on the glass until my palms went numb. "Cassius, please, I just had surgery, please—" Through the fogged door I could see a shape standing in the hallway, still and patient. Katalina. Watching. Her face was calm as still water.

I don't know how long I was in there. Long enough that my skin along both forearms rose into blisters, tight and shining. Long enough that my voice, when he finally opened the door, came out as barely a thread of sound.

I don't remember walking to the living room afterward. I remember the marble floor coming up fast and cold against my cheek.

Wesley's sneakers stopped a foot from my head. Eleven years old, and his voice already had that same flat, bored cruelty his father used on the phone with people he didn't respect.

"Just leave her, Dad," he said. "She's faking it again."

I opened my eyes enough to see Cassius look down at me. One second. Two. I counted them, because counting was the only thing my brain could still do. Then he stepped over me — actually lifted his foot and stepped over my body — and put his hand on his son's shoulder, and they walked away together, talking about dinner.

I lay on the marble and looked at the ceiling, at the crown molding I'd chosen from a catalog nine years ago, and I felt something inside my chest go quiet. Not broken. Just — finished. Like a machine switching off.

That night, once the house had gone dark and silent, I got up and went to the closet and pulled a shoebox from behind the winter coats. Amtrak stubs. A stack of letters in his handwriting, the good handwriting, from before. A Polaroid from a diner in Portland, the night he got down on one knee between the ketchup bottle and the sugar packets.

I read one letter all the way through. His words, twenty-four years old and stupid with love, promising me things he never once tried to keep.

Then I struck a match.

I burned all of it in the kitchen sink, the paper curling black at the edges, smoke rising thin and gray toward the vent above the stove. I watched until there was nothing left but ash and the smell of it clinging to my sleeves.

Then I opened the envelope I'd been carrying in my coat pocket for three days — the one with the federal seal, the acceptance letter, the words CLASSIFIED and RELOCATION and NEW IDENTITY typed in a font too plain for what it meant — and I took a pen from the drawer, and on the calendar by the phone, I circled a date.

Eleven days from now.

Eleven more days of being Audrey Reynolds. Then never again.