After His Mistress Poisoned Our Baby, He Blamed Me

I was folding a stack of Gracelynn's onesies on the bed when I heard it — a scream, high and sharp, coming from the hallway. Then a heavy thud. Then another scream, closer to a name this time.

"Anna! Oh God, Anna, help me!"

I dropped the onesie and ran.

Danna was at the bottom of the landing, one leg bent wrong, her hair fanned out across the marble like she'd arranged it herself. Three of the household staff were already there — the new maid, the pool boy, a delivery man who had no business being inside the house at all — all frozen in the doorway to the great room, staring up at me.

"She pushed me," Danna sobbed, pointing a shaking finger past them, up the stairs, at me. "She came at me and she pushed me!"

I hadn't moved from the top step. I hadn't even come close to her.

Brandon came out of his study so fast his tie was still loose around his collar. He took the stairs two at a time, and for one half-second, I thought he was coming to me. I actually thought that. Four years of marriage will teach you to hope in increments so small they don't even feel like hope anymore, just reflex.

He stopped at the landing. He looked at Danna, crumpled and beautiful even now, mascara bleeding artfully down one cheek. Then he looked up at me.

Something closed behind his eyes.

"Brandon—" I started.

He was already moving. His hand closed around my left arm, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise on contact, and he swung me toward the banister with his whole body behind it. I heard the sound before I felt it — a dry, flat crack, like a green branch snapping underfoot. Then the pain arrived, a full second late, white and total, and my legs went out from under me.

I went down on the marble. Cold, so cold, against my cheek.

I don't remember deciding to curl around my stomach. My body did it without asking me.

I'd found out that morning. Six weeks. I'd stood in the bathroom with the little pink line staring back at me and thought, *I'll tell him tonight, I'll find the right moment, maybe after Gracelynn's bath, maybe when it's just the two of us.* I had been carrying that secret around all day like something warm tucked inside my coat.

On the marble floor, I felt it leave me.

There was no scream in me for that. That kind of pain doesn't come out as a scream. It just sits in you, silent and enormous, while the world keeps moving around it.

"Call an ambulance," Brandon was saying, already crouched over Danna, his hand smoothing her hair back from her face. "Now. Someone call now."

No one called for me. No one even looked at me, curled on my side at the foot of the stairs, both arms wrapped around what wasn't there anymore. The pool boy was already dialing. The maid had her hands pressed to her mouth. Brandon murmured something to Danna I couldn't hear, and she reached up and touched his jaw like she'd done it a hundred times before.

I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough for the ambulance sirens to swell outside, long enough for two paramedics to jog past me carrying a gurney like I was furniture in the hallway. I pushed myself up with my right arm, my left hanging wrong at my side, and I crawled — actually crawled, palm and knee, palm and knee — toward the powder room off the east hall, because it was the only door in that house I could still reach.

I got the door shut behind me. I don't remember locking it. I don't remember much of anything after that except the tile, and the blood, and the sound of my own breathing, too fast, not enough air getting anywhere it needed to go.

A soft knock. "Miss Anna?" Rosa's voice, low, careful. "Miss Anna, it's Rosa. Open the door, please."

I didn't answer. I don't know how long I didn't answer. Long enough that when I finally reached up and turned the lock, my hand was shaking too hard to do it smoothly the first time.

Rosa looked down. She saw the blood on the tile, the way I was holding my arm, the color that must have been in my face by then. She didn't gasp. She didn't call for anyone. She just knelt down on the floor beside me, in her uniform, on tile that would ruin the knees of it, and put one hand flat against my back.

"I'm here," she said. Nothing else. No questions. No *what happened*, no *I'll get Mr. Stone*.

Just that. I'm here.

I don't remember what I said back, if I said anything at all. I remember the warmth of her hand through my blouse, steady, not moving, while somewhere down the hall Brandon's voice rose and fell in the particular register he saved only for Danna — worried, tender, alive.

I closed my eyes. Rosa stayed exactly where she was.

It was the only kindness in that house that night. I would remember it, precisely, for the rest of my life.