Dinner started normal enough. Roasted chicken, the good china, Wesley scrolling on his phone under the table like Cassius couldn't see. Then Katalina set down her fork and pressed a hand to her chest.
"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. Her voice shook just right. "But I can't keep pretending I'm not scared."
Cassius put his own fork down. "Scared of what?"
"Today. In the hallway." She looked at me, and her eyes filled up on command, like a faucet turning. "Audrey came right up to me. She said if anything happened to me, or to the baby, it would be my fault. She said it so calm, Cassius. That's what scared me. How calm she was."
I hadn't said a word to her all day. I hadn't been near her.
Wesley looked up from his phone for the first time all dinner. He didn't say anything. He just watched me the way you'd watch something on the news, some stranger's disaster.
Cassius's fist came down on the table hard enough to rattle the glasses. "Apologize to her."
"I never said that."
"She's pregnant, Audrey. She's carrying my child. And you're standing there threatening her?"
"I never said that," I said again. Quieter this time. Not because I was backing down. Because I already knew it didn't matter what I said.
Katalina dabbed under her eye with her napkin, careful not to smudge anything. Underneath the napkin, for just a second, I caught the corner of her mouth. It wasn't trembling. It was almost smiling.
I looked at my son. Eleven years old, and he was watching his mother get accused of threatening a baby, and there was nothing on his face. No doubt. No question. Just that same bored contempt, waiting to see what would happen next.
I set my fork down. I folded my napkin into a neat square and laid it beside my plate. Then I stood up and walked out of the dining room, and nobody called after me, and I didn't look back to see if they watched me go.
That was the last dinner I ever had in that house.
---
The message came through at 6:14 in the morning, while the house was still dark. I'd learned to check the device the second I woke, before my eyes even adjusted to the light. Three words and a number.
*Extraction window: 72 hours.*
I lay there a minute, feeling my own heartbeat instead of hearing it, and then I got up and started working.
Not packing clothes. Clothes could be replaced, and besides, none of what hung in that closet belonged to the woman I was about to become. I didn't take photographs either. Every photograph in that house had Cassius in it, or Wesley, or some version of a smile I didn't trust anymore, not even on my own face.
What I packed was years of handwriting. Notebooks I'd filled in secret, back when I still had a mind sharp enough to notice things and a habit I never let go of — dosages, symptoms, dates, the small cruelties nobody else would ever write down because nobody else needed proof the way I did. My research, too, half-finished papers from before I ever became somebody's wife, kept in a box I told myself for years I'd get back to.
I wrapped it all in plastic and sealed it in a waterproof case, the kind fishermen use, and I put the case at the bottom of my gym bag under a folded yoga mat nobody in that house had ever seen me use.
Seventy-two hours. I counted them the way I used to count Cassius's silences on the marble floor. One. Two.
---
My mother called on the second day.
"You've lost weight," she said, no hello first. That was Margaret Lane. Straight to the wound. "I saw you at the grocery store parking lot last week, from across the street. I almost didn't recognize you, Audrey."
"I've been busy."
"Busy doesn't blister your arms like that." A pause, the kind she used to let stretch out when I was a teenager and she knew I was lying about where I'd been. "I called Dr. Kim's office. I talked to your neighbor, the one with the dog. Audrey, something is wrong in that house."
"Mom, please." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "Please stop asking questions."
"Why would I stop—"
"I'll explain everything soon," I said. "I promise. Just — give me a little time. Please stop asking around."
She went quiet on the other end, and I could picture her exactly, sitting at her kitchen table with the phone pressed too hard against her ear, the way she always did when she was worried and trying not to show it.
"Okay," she said finally. "Okay, Bella. I'll wait."
I told her I loved her. I meant it more than I'd meant anything I'd said out loud in that house in years. I didn't know, hanging up the phone, that I was already running out of time to keep any promise I made her. I didn't know a lot of things yet. I only knew the clock in my chest, ticking down toward seventy-two hours, toward the last version of myself I would ever have to be.
