Abandoning Regretful Ex After Released

The marble pressed cold against my cheek.

My mouth was still saying I'm sorry. My eyes were still fixed on the curl of Barbara's slipper. But somewhere behind my ribs the lock on a door I had spent three years bolting shut slid open, and I went down through it.

Three years ago. The same foyer. The same chandelier.

I had been wearing blue.

Sapphire silk. A dress my mother had called too much. Twenty-two. Barbara had pinned the dress at my hip herself that afternoon, her mouth full of pins.

"You'll outshine everyone tonight, Kate."

"You sure? It's your color."

She'd taken the last pin out of her teeth and smiled at me in the mirror. "It's your night. Just wear it."

I'd believed her. That was the part that still turned my stomach.

By eight o'clock the foyer was full. Champagne, cigar smoke, an orchestra tuning somewhere down the hall. Sam had his hand at the small of my back. Mom's ring was new on my finger, the gold still strange against my skin.

Barbara appeared at the top of the east staircase in a white tulle dress I had never seen her own.

"Kate." She crooked one finger. "Come here a minute."

I went.

I walked up those stairs in my blue silk with my chin up and my mother's ring catching the chandelier, and when I reached the top she leaned in and pressed her mouth to my ear.

"Why is Sam your fianc��," she said, "when he should be mine?"

I jerked back.

Her eyes were already dry. Her hand was already on the banister, and she was looking past my shoulder at the crowd below like she was checking the angle of the light. I felt something in my chest skip like a record.

"Barbara, what are you��"

She let go of the banister.

She stepped backward off the top stair and her body went down the way a doll goes down. Arms loose. Head tipped. The white tulle blooming around her like a parachute. I heard the sound her shoulder made on the third step. I heard the sound her hip made on the seventh.

A glass shattered somewhere below.

Father reached her first. John Smith in his black tie, on his knees beside his older daughter, his hands hovering above her like he didn't know where to touch.

"Barbara. Barbara, sweetheart��"

"Daddy��" Her voice came out cracked. Perfect. A porcelain crack. "Daddy, I can't feel my legs."

I was still at the top of the staircase. My hand was still raised in the air where her mouth had been at my ear.

Sam came out of the crowd.

He looked up at me from the bottom of the staircase with a face I had never seen on him. Not anger. Not even disgust. The cold flat look of a man closing a file.

"I didn't think you were like this, Kate." His voice carried. He wanted it to carry. "Jealous of your own sister."

"Sam, I didn't push her��she��"

"She told me you'd been threatening her all week." He shook his head once. "I didn't believe her. That's on me."

A hundred faces in a hundred glittering dresses, and every one of them had already decided.

Father stood up from Barbara without looking at her. He looked up the stairs at me.

"You'll pay for what you've done."

Three sentences. That was all it took. By midnight I was in the back of a police car in my blue dress.

The cell at Carrington Women's was eight feet by ten. Three other women. A bunk with a mattress that smelled like old water.

The first night a woman named Reese broke my nose with the heel of her hand because I was on her bunk. I hadn't known it was hers. There was no sign.

"That's a rich-girl nose," she said, while I tried to stop the bleeding with the front of my prison shirt. "Was."

I stopped sleeping on the bunk. I slept on the floor under it. The concrete was cold and the cold made my back lock up by morning, but the floor did not belong to anyone.

Food worked the same way. The trays came out at six and the trays got picked over by everyone who could hit harder than me. What was left at the end of the table was what I ate. Bread, mostly. Sometimes the gristle off a chicken leg. I learned to chew slowly so my jaw didn't ache around the bruise.

After the first year I stopped flinching when the boots came near. After the second year I stopped crying at night. After the third I stopped thinking about Sam's face at the bottom of the staircase, or Father's hand on Barbara's shoulder, or the small careful smile Barbara had given me from the gurney as they wheeled her out the front door.

The prison doctor wrote words on a chart. Dissociative something. Post-traumatic something. He gave me pills I sometimes took.

The pills were better than the dreams.

I learned to drop. If a guard raised her voice, I went down. Hands over the head, knees to the chest, *I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry* in the same flat key, fast and small, before the boot landed. By year two, my body did it without asking.

I told myself it was a kind of mercy. On the floor, forehead pressed to concrete, there was no one to look at.

There was someone to look at now.

I came back to the foyer a piece at a time. The buzz of the chandelier. The marble under my cheek. The toothbrush, two feet from my hand, still on the floor where I had dropped it.

Sam was crouched in front of me with his hands open at his sides, the way a man holds his hands when he is trying not to scare an animal.

"Kate." His voice was different than it had been a minute ago. Not the contract voice. Something underneath it. "Kate. It's me. Look at me."

I looked at him through the gap in my arms.

His face had gone the color of paper. His mouth was open a little. The scar above his eyebrow was the same scar �� but the man wearing it had just realized something he had not been ready to realize.

"How long have you been doing this." He gestured at me on the floor. He couldn't say the word. "How long, Kate."

I didn't answer.

His right hand was shaking. I had not seen Sam's hand shake since he was nineteen, on the side of a road, after a horse threw him.

Behind him, Barbara had not moved.

Her blanket was smooth across her lap. Her face was turned toward me with the soft, wet look of a woman watching her broken sister come home. Her mouth made a small sad line.

But her eyes.

For half a second �� less �� her eyes traveled over my body on the floor and the corner of her mouth lifted. Not a smile. The shape under a smile. The shape a person makes when a long calculation finishes the way she wanted.

It was gone before Sam could turn his head.

Her gaze caught mine.

Her fingers, resting on the cashmere over her knee, curled once into the fabric and then went flat. Her chin dipped, just slightly, the way a player tips a card to acknowledge a hand well played.

The pearl clip in her hair caught the chandelier and threw a small white circle of light onto the marble �� exactly halfway between her satin slipper and my open hand.

Neither of us moved to cover it.