After My Husband Drugged Me to Kill Our Babies

Derek came on the second day.

I heard him before I saw him. The soft knock. The door opening. His footsteps on the linoleum floor. I kept my eyes on the window. Outside, the sky was white and flat. A pigeon sat on the ledge and didn't move.

He pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. I could feel him looking at me. At the gauze wrapped from my wrists to my elbows. At the IV line. At the monitors.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

Then: "I've been worried about you."

I kept looking at the pigeon.

"For a long time, actually." His voice was careful. Measured. The voice he used in meetings when he needed someone to agree with him without realizing they were agreeing. "I think you've been under enormous strain. More than anyone should carry alone."

The pigeon shifted on the ledge. Ruffled its wings. Settled again.

"I've been looking into some options," Derek said. "There are people who specialize in this kind of thing. Grief. Trauma. I think it would help you to talk to someone."

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist. The gauze stopped me. I pressed harder anyway.

"Sienna." Softer now. "I'm concerned about your mental state."

I turned my head and looked at him.

He looked tired. Thinner than I remembered. His eyes were doing the thing they did when he was trying to seem open—slightly wider, eyebrows lifted just enough. I used to think that look meant he was listening. I knew now it meant he was calculating.

I looked at him and said nothing.

He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded slowly, like I had agreed to something. Like my silence was a door he could walk through.

He was wrong.

He stayed another twenty minutes. Talked about rest. About healing. About how he wanted to support me through this. He never said the word fire. Never said the word children. Never said Ellis.

When he left he touched the back of my hand. Lightly. Like a period at the end of a sentence.

I looked back at the window. The pigeon was gone.

---

Three weeks later, Derek came to the apartment with a folder.

I was sitting at the kitchen table. Coffee going cold in front of me. He set the folder down and opened it. Photographs of a property. Stone buildings. Open land. Rolling hills in the distance.

"It's a falconry estate," he said. "Private. About three hours out."

I looked at the photographs.

"Ellis designed the program herself." He sat down across from me. His hands flat on the table. Patient. Reasonable. "It's a purification ritual. Spiritual. Working with birds of prey—it's about releasing what you've been carrying. Letting go of the pain."

I lifted my coffee cup. Set it back down.

"I know things have been hard," he said. "For both of us. That's why I think this matters. This is for both of us, Sienna. A chance to finally let go of the pain."

I looked at him across the table.

He believed what he was saying. That was the thing that used to break me. He always believed what he was saying, right up until the moment the words left his mouth. He had a gift for it—for building a story so clean and so reasonable that even he couldn't see the rot underneath.

I thought about the room with no windows. The fluorescent light that buzzed like something dying. Eleven days of counting breaths in the dark.

I thought about the hallway full of smoke. The beam across the door. The child's arm in my hands. My skin splitting open.

I thought about his car pulling away from the curb. Ellis's head against his shoulder. His eyes never turning back.

I thought: *He has already decided I'm going.*

I thought: *If I say no, there will be consequences. There are always consequences.*

I thought: *But this is the last time.*

I didn't know yet how I would get out. I didn't have a plan. I had Jayleen, and I had the quiet, absolute knowledge that had been sitting in my chest since the night I knelt on the sidewalk watching him drive away. The knowledge that there was nothing left to break.

When you have nothing left to lose, you stop being afraid.

"Okay," I said.

His shoulders dropped half an inch. Relief. He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. His palm was warm.

"This is going to help," he said. "I really believe that."

I looked at his hand on mine.

I thought: *The last time.*

I thought: *After this, I disappear.*

I thought: *Let him have this one.*

Outside the kitchen window the city moved and breathed and went on being itself. I sat very still and let him hold my hand and felt nothing at all.

That was how I knew I was ready.