My Husband Let Them Burn Me for His Mistress

They dropped me at the front gate like a package left on a doorstep.

Wren carried me inside. His arms were careful. Too careful. The kind of careful you use when something is already broken and you don't want to see the pieces shift.

He set me on the couch. He said my name three times. I didn't answer.

I was looking at my hands.

They rested in my lap like two things that didn't belong to me. The right one was wrapped in gauze. The left one wasn't. Both of them were trembling. Not shaking the way they used to shake when I was nervous. This was different. This was deep. A fine, constant hum under the skin, like a wire pulled too tight.

"I'm going to call a doctor," Wren said.

"I want my brushes."

He stopped halfway to the door. "Emerald—"

"My brushes."

He didn't argue.

He brought the whole box up to the spare room himself. He set it on the desk and backed away like a man walking out of a chapel. I didn't look at him. I was already reaching.

I picked up the smallest brush. The one I used for faces. The handle felt wrong. Lighter. Or maybe my hand felt heavier. I couldn't tell.

I dipped it in water. The water trembled in the jar.

I touched the brush to the canvas.

The line came out wrong. Not crooked. Not shaky. Wrong. Like someone else was holding the handle, and they didn't know what a line was supposed to be.

I tried again. Lower. Slower.

The brush slipped out of my fingers and rolled across the floor.

I watched it roll. I watched it stop against the baseboard. I didn't pick it up.

I picked up another one.

An hour passed. Maybe two. The light shifted on the wall. My hands kept getting worse. By the time I heard footsteps in the hallway, I couldn't close my fingers around anything smaller than my own wrist.

The doctor was a quiet man in a gray coat. He didn't give me his name. He unwrapped the gauze. He pressed on the muscles between my thumb and forefinger. He asked me to make a fist.

I tried.

My fingers twitched. Half-curled. Stopped.

He asked me to touch each fingertip to my thumb.

I tried.

I couldn't.

He put his instruments away without hurrying. He spoke to Wren in the hall. I heard pieces of it through the half-open door. *Neurotoxic agent. Fine motor pathways. Significant denervation. Recovery—* a pause. *Uncertain. The window is narrow.*

When Wren came back in, his face was arranged. That was how I thought of it. Arranged. Like a bed someone had made in a hurry.

He sat on the edge of the desk. He wouldn't look at my hands.

I held them up anyway. I lifted them slowly, both of them, palms toward him. The right one twitched. The left one didn't move at all.

"Wren."

"Don't."

"Did you do this to me?"

My voice came out small. Smaller than I meant. Just above a whisper, the way you ask a question when you already know the answer and you only want to hear it out loud.

He moved so fast I almost flinched. He was on his knees in front of me, taking my wrists in his hands, and his eyes were wet and wide and loud with denial before his mouth even opened.

"No. No, Emerald, no. God, no. How could you—how could you even think that. I would never. I would never let anyone touch you. You have to believe me. You have to—"

He said it too many times. Each *no* was a brick laid on top of the last one. He was building a wall between me and something, and the thing on the other side was the truth.

I watched his eyes. They answered first. They always answered first.

He knew.

Maybe he hadn't held the needle. Maybe he hadn't been in the room. But he knew.

I pulled my wrists out of his hands. It took effort. My fingers wouldn't grip, so I had to drag them backward across his palms.

"Get out," I said.

He got out.

I don't remember sliding off the chair. I only remember the floor. Cold boards under my knees. Canvases turned to the wall, all around me, every one of them unfinished. A whole room of beginnings that would never have ends.

I sat with my hands open in my lap. Palms up. The way the doctor had held them.

I didn't cry.

There was nothing to cry with. The place inside me where crying lived had been emptied out. What was left was quieter than grief. It was the sound after grief. The hum of an empty room.

I stared at my hands until the light outside the window went blue, then gray, then black.

Somewhere in the house, a camera blinked in a smoke detector I had never noticed. I didn't know it then. I didn't know that a man I hadn't seen since I was a child was watching the feed in a dark office across the city, his jaw set, his hand already reaching for a phone.

I only knew the floor was cold.

And that two days later, when they came for me again, I wouldn't be the only one they took. A city away, in a car idling outside a boutique, Arlet was adjusting her sunglasses in the mirror, one hand resting on her belly, humming along to the radio.

She didn't see the van either.