After My Husband Tried to Kill Me for Her

The coastal wind doesn't care that my ribs still ache from the fall.

It tears at my hair, salts my cracked lips, hammers against the camera equipment cases I've been hauling across wet rock for the past two hours. My left leg throbs with every uneven step—the same leg I shattered in the rose bushes a week ago. The doctor said rest. Isaac said: *be ready by eight.*

I'm ready by eight.

The cliff site is spectacular, objectively. The kind of location I would have scouted myself, once—sea-stacked granite jutting over churning Atlantic gray, light fracturing through cloud cover in silver columns. My fingers find the camera body out of pure reflex, and for half a second, the old hunger stirs. The artist in me, stubborn and stupid, still alive.

Then Angelique steps out of the SUV in a white chiffon gown that snaps like a sail in the wind, and the hunger curdles into something else.

"The light's too flat," she announces, not looking at me. "Fix it."

I lift the reflector. My arms shake.

Isaac stands apart, scrolling his phone, already somewhere else entirely. He's dressed in a charcoal suit, his collar open, looking like an editorial spread for men who've never suffered. He doesn't acknowledge me. He hasn't acknowledged me since they pulled me out of the rose bushes. Since he stood over me in the dark and called me dramatic.

I take the shots.

For an hour, I am only the mechanism behind the lens—adjusting, framing, swallowing the bile that rises each time they touch. Angelique orchestrates their poses with the precision of a woman who has rehearsed this victory for years. She tips her face up to Isaac's. Her fingers curl into his lapel. His hand settles at the small of her back, automatic, absent of tenderness but sufficient for the frame.

The camera records everything I cannot say.

Then Angelique's voice slices through the wind. "I want the one by the edge. Isaac's hands on my face. Really holding me." She turns to look at me directly for the first time all morning. "And I want it close. Intimate. You'll need to get down on the rock to shoot up."

I look at the rock she means. A wet ledge, maybe eighteen inches wide, jutting over a thirty-foot drop to churning water.

"The angle isn't necessary," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I can get the same composition from—"

"I wasn't asking your professional opinion." Her tone is light, conversational, the way a scalpel is light. "Isaac, tell her."

He finally pockets his phone. Looks at me. Through me.

"Just take the picture, Ivy."

The camera feels very heavy in my hands.

"No."

The word falls between us like a stone into deep water. I watch the ripples spread across Isaac's face—surprise first, then something that hardens fast.

"What did you say?"

"I said no." Something has come loose in my chest. Some last bolt of fear I didn't know I'd been depending on. "I won't photograph your engagement. Not that pose. Not any of this." I lower the camera. "I'm done."

Isaac moves. Three strides across the rock, and his hand closes around my arm—the same grip, the same bruising certainty. "You don't get to be done. You don't get to decide anything."

He reaches for the camera.

I hold on.

For three seconds, I hold on—my hands white-knuckled around the strap, my heels sliding on wet granite, every ruined muscle in my body screaming—because the camera is the last thing that is still mine, the last proof that somewhere underneath all this wreckage there is a person with a name and a talent and a life worth living.

He shoves me.

Not a push. A shove—full-shouldered, deliberate, the kind of force that makes a decision for you.

The rock meets my skull with a sound I feel before I hear. White. Then nothing. Then white again, fractured, the sky in pieces overhead, the sea noise enormous and indifferent.

I don't hear them leave. I only know they're gone from the silence.

---

The hospital ceiling has a water stain shaped like a map of nowhere.

I've been staring at it for three hours. The nurse who admitted me—young, efficient, careful not to meet my eyes when the intake form asked *how did this happen*—has not come back. No one has called. No one knows I'm here, or no one who knows cares.

The borrowed phone is a cheap prepaid, pressed into my palm an hour ago by a woman whose name tag read *Greta* and whose expression read *I've seen this before*. "Ten minutes," she'd murmured. "I never gave you anything."

I dial the number I've kept memorized for years. Kept the way you keep an emergency exit in your mind—not because you plan to use it, but because knowing it's there lets you breathe.

It rings twice.

"Ivy." Hugo's voice is steady and low and immediately present, like he was already awake, like some part of him has been waiting.

The ceiling blurs.

"Hugo." My voice breaks on the second syllable. "I need you to help me disappear."