They wanted me always slightly off balance, always braced, always scanning their faces for the next infraction I had committed without knowing it.

I had spent the last year of that marriage in a state of constant, low, exhausting vigilance, trying to be perfect enough to keep the peace, and the salt in the stew taught me the thing I should have understood long before: that there was no perfect.

The target moved on purpose.

The whole point was that I could never reach it.

And a person who finally understands that the rules are unwinnable has, at last, no reason left to keep playing.

Chapter 2 — The Man Who Swore to Protect Me

When Garrett had first walked in and found me down there, some foolish, hopeful part of me — the part that still believed the vows he’d made — thought he would rush to me, that he would call an ambulance, that whatever was wrong with this house he would at least not let me lie there hurt.

Instead he crouched down beside me, and he took my chin in his hand, and he turned my face up to his so that I had to look into his eyes, and his eyes were empty.

There was nothing in them.

Not anger, even, which would have been something.

Just a flat, bored indifference, as though I were a task he was tired of.

“You always provoke my mother, Maren,” he said.

“What would it have cost you to keep your mouth shut?” “I need a hospital,” I whispered.

Cold sweat had soaked through my clothes and I was starting to shake in a way I couldn’t control.