My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Our Dying Son

The doctor arrives at ten, carrying a leather bag that looks expensive and empty. He's younger than I expected, with gelled hair and a watch that catches the light when he sets his stethoscope on the coffee table.

Christopher stands by the window, arms crossed, while Holly perches on the arm of the sofa like a concerned sister. The doctor doesn't ask me to sit. I remain standing in my gray uniform—back to the standard issue after last night's humiliation—my hands clasped in front of me.

"Let's have a look." He doesn't move toward me. Just studies me from across the room, his gaze clinical and distant. "Open your mouth."

I comply. He squints, nods.

"Tongue looks fine. Any pain?"

"Sometimes my chest—"

"Anxiety." He's already writing on his pad. "Classic presentation. The coughing, the theatrical bleeding—it's psychosomatic. A manifestation of guilt and stress."

Christopher's jaw ticks. "So she's faking it."

"Not consciously, perhaps." The doctor caps his pen with a decisive click. "But the mind can produce very convincing symptoms when seeking attention or absolution. Combined with self-imposed malnutrition—likely an eating disorder stemming from control issues—you have a perfect storm of manufactured crisis."

Holly's hand flies to her mouth. "Oh, Bella. We had no idea it was this serious."

The doctor hands Christopher a prescription. "Anxiety medication. And I'd recommend regular meals, supervised if necessary. She needs structure. Discipline."

He leaves without examining me further. Without checking my pulse or listening to my lungs or asking about the blood I've been hiding in handkerchiefs for weeks.

Christopher folds the prescription into his pocket. "You heard him. This stops now. The dramatics, the victim act—all of it."

I nod because that's all I have left.

---

The patio needs scrubbing. Winter grime has settled into the stone, gray and stubborn. I'm on my hands and knees with a wire brush when I hear the patio door slide open behind me.

Holly's heels click across the stone. She doesn't speak, just stands there, her shadow falling across my work. Then she turns and goes back inside.

Something cold settles in my stomach.

I finish the patio in forty minutes, my knees screaming, my lungs tight. When I return to my storage room, the door is ajar. I always close it. Always.

Inside, my few belongings are disturbed. The spare uniform shifted. The stack of cleaning rags moved. And the hollowed-out copy of Wuthering Heights—the one I found in a box marked for donation, the one I chose because no one reads the classics anymore—is open on the floor.

Empty.

My heart stops.

I tear through the small space, checking under the cot, behind the boxes of Holly's shoes, inside the pockets of my other uniform. Nothing. The locket is gone.

I know who took it. I've always known who she was.

I find her in the living room, curled on the sofa with a magazine, a glass of white wine on the side table. She doesn't look up when I enter.

"Give it back." My voice is steady. Flat.

Holly turns a page. "Give what back?"

"You know what."

Now she looks up, her eyes wide with false innocence. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Bella. Are you feeling alright? Maybe you should take that medication the doctor prescribed."

"The locket. It's mine. It has nothing to do with you or Christopher or any of this."

She sets down the magazine slowly, deliberately. Reaches into her pocket and pulls out the tarnished silver oval. It looks so small in her manicured hand.

"This?" She opens it, studies the lock of hair inside. "Mason. What a sweet name." Her eyes lift to mine, and there's nothing sweet in them. "Mendoza's brat, I assume?"

The room tilts. "Don't."

"Don't what?" She stands, moving toward the kitchen. I follow, my body moving on autopilot. "Don't acknowledge that you spread your legs for a cartel boss? That you gave him a child while Christopher was building an empire to save you?"

"He wasn't Ramon's." The words rip out of me. "He was never—"

"Sure he wasn't." Holly's at the sink now, holding the locket over the drain. The garbage disposal's black mouth waits below. "You know what I think? I think Mendoza's spawn doesn't deserve to be remembered. I think he was probably as worthless as his mother."

She drops the locket.

The sound it makes hitting the metal is small. Final.

"No—" I lunge forward, but Holly's hand is already on the switch.

The disposal roars to life. Metal screams against metal, a grinding, shrieking sound that drowns out my scream. I reach into the drain without thinking, my fingers scraping against the spinning blades, trying to find something, anything—

Holly grabs my wrist, yanks me back. "Are you insane?"

The disposal grinds on. And on. Until there's nothing left but silence and the smell of burnt metal.

Holly flips the switch. The quiet that follows is absolute.

"Oops." She examines her nails. "How clumsy of me."

I stare into the drain. My fingers are bleeding, small cuts from the blades. But I barely feel them. All I feel is the absence. The last piece of Mason—his hair, soft and dark, the only part of him I had left—is gone. Ground to nothing.

Something breaks inside me. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet snap, like a thread pulled too tight for too long.

I start to laugh.

It bubbles up from somewhere deep, somewhere I didn't know still existed. Holly takes a step back, her confidence flickering.

"Bella?"

The laughter turns to sobs, then back to laughter. I slide down the cabinet, my bloody fingers leaving streaks on the white lacquer, and I can't stop. Can't breathe. Can't think past the sound of metal grinding and a baby crying and Christopher's voice saying *don't contact me again* and Ramon's gun against my father's head and Mason's small body in my arms, so still, so cold—

"What the hell is going on?"

Christopher's voice cuts through the hysteria. He's in the doorway, still in his suit, his eyes moving from Holly to me to the blood on the cabinet.

I look up at him, and I start to laugh again. Because it's all so perfectly awful. So completely, irreversibly broken.

"She's lost it," Holly whispers, backing toward Christopher. "I was just making tea and she attacked the garbage disposal. Chris, I think she's having a breakdown."

But I'm not looking at Holly anymore. I'm looking at Christopher, and for the first time in three years, I'm going to tell him the truth. All of it. Every terrible, beautiful, devastating piece.

Even if it kills me.