I signed the discharge papers with my left hand because my right one didn't work anymore, not really. The nurse told me I was making a mistake. I told her I'd made worse ones and survived them, which wasn't exactly a lie.
I called Lennon from the elevator. She didn't pick up. I left seven words on her voicemail, no more, because I didn't trust myself to string together an eighth without falling apart. "I know what they did. I'm going."
Then I turned my phone off.
Miguel found me a phone number before he'd even finished nodding. He still drove for the Fosters some nights, filling in when the new man called out, and he still remembered the years he used to bring me coffee. He didn't ask why I wanted to know where Armani Mendoza had dinner reservations that night. He just texted me an address in the Meatpacking District and three words. *Be careful, ma'am.*
I still had the hospital cardigan on under my coat. I didn't care. I got in a cab and gave the driver the address and watched the city blur past the window, all lights and glass, none of it mine anymore.
The club didn't have a sign. Just a black door and a man who let me in because I said Foster and didn't blink when I said it.
I found her in a private corridor off the dining room, checking her phone under a sconce that made her look like she'd been carved out of marble. She looked up. For a second — one second, no more — something cold moved behind her eyes, quick and assessing, like a woman doing math.
Then it was gone. The warmth slid back into place like a mask clicking shut.
"Saoirse." She said my name the way you'd say the name of someone who'd wandered in off the street. "You're not well. Let me call Nathanael."
"I heard you," I said. My voice came out low. Steady. I didn't have anything left to perform with, so there was nothing left to shake. "On a nurse's phone. You said the baby was someone else's mistake. You said it was a mercy."
Her face didn't move. "You should be resting."
"Did he tell you to say that? Or was that yours?"
She didn't answer. She was already typing.
Nathanael arrived in twelve minutes. I know because I counted them, standing in that narrow hallway with my ruined wrist cradled against my chest, watching the door like it might open on something different than what I knew was coming.
It didn't.
He didn't ask what happened. He didn't ask why I was there, or why I'd left the hospital, or why my face looked like it did. He looked at Armani first — one long look, some silent conversation passing between them that I wasn't part of and never had been — and then he looked at me.
"You shouldn't have come here," he said.
"I need you to listen to me. Just once. Just for a minute—"
He reached out and took my wrist.
The one that was already broken.
He didn't know. I don't think he knew. But it didn't matter, because his grip closed around it full force, and I heard the bones give before I felt them, a small wet snap like a dry branch underfoot, and the sound filled the whole corridor.
I didn't scream. I looked at him. I don't know what my face did, but it wasn't fear, and it wasn't anger. It was something quieter than both. Recognition, maybe. The last piece of a puzzle I'd spent three years refusing to finish.
He let go. Two men in dark suits materialized behind him — security, the kind that didn't have names, only instructions.
"Make sure she understands," Nathanael said, not looking at me anymore, already turning away, "what happens to women who don't know their place."
They walked me toward the service corridor. My wrist hung wrong at my side. I remember thinking, distantly, that I should be more afraid than I was.
Armani caught up to us before we reached the door. She spoke to the taller one, quiet, quick, a hand light on his forearm like she was smoothing a wrinkle out of a tablecloth. He nodded. Something passed between them — a folded bill, maybe, or just three years of small favors finally called in.
Another set of hands took me after that. I don't remember whose.
There was an elevator. A sting in my arm, sharp and then warm, spreading up through my shoulder like ink through water. There was a car, and the smell of new leather, and streetlights sliding past the window in long yellow smears until the streetlights stopped and there was only dark.
I remember cold ground under my back. I remember the smell of turned earth, mineral and wet. I remember thinking, with the last clear thought I had, that I never got to show Craig — no. Not Craig. Someone else. Someone whose name I couldn't hold onto anymore, sliding away from me like everything else.
Then there was weight. And then there was nothing at all.
Somewhere behind me, in a room with good lighting and better champagne, Armani straightened the hem of her dress, checked her reflection in a darkened window, and walked back into the party smiling.
