Chapter 1 — The Text
The blue glare of my phone screen wouldn’t let me look away, though every part of me wanted to.
Why couldn’t you just let it go? my husband’s message read. You know how Mom gets.
You always make things a bigger deal than they are.
Don’t play the victim.
You’ll be home tomorrow.
Apologize to my mother and we’ll put this behind us.
Shane Ashcroft’s words sat in a neat row on the glass, and the worst thing about them wasn’t their cruelty.
It was their boredom.
I was lying in a hospital bed with stitches in my scalp and a concussion the doctors wanted to watch overnight, and the man I’d married five years ago had found the time, between casts of his fishing line, to tell me I’d overreacted.
The only sound in the room was the slow tick of my IV.
When the night nurse came to check my vitals, she moved around me carefully, the way you move around someone who’s been broken.
“Is there family we can call for you?” she asked, and her gentleness nearly undid me more than any harshness could have.
“There’s no one to call right now,” I said.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of a name.
It was that, in that fluorescent quiet, a clean and terrible clarity had cut through the fog in my head.
In the condo in Columbus that I had spent five years bleeding myself dry to keep standing, there had never once been a chair set out for me — not a single place where I could sit down and simply be a person who needed something.
I had always been the one carrying the chairs.