He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 03

He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 03

There’s a thing that happens when grief goes past a certain point. You stop being a person. You become a room with the lights off.

“Go get her,” Damien repeated.

Sienna sat up in my bed and pulled the sheet to her chin, all soft eyes. “Damien, don’t push her. She’s obviously upset.”

He grabbed my elbow and steered me into the hall, out of her hearing, the way he does when he’s about to say something even he knows is ugly.

“Where were you last night?” he said. “You didn’t come home. My wife doesn’t get to disappear for twelve hours and then stand there giving me that look.”

I didn’t answer.

“Is it another surgeon? Some resident?” His grip tightened. “You crawled into this family on your knees, Grace. You don’t get to have dignity now.”

Still I said nothing.

That was what broke him. He shoved me back onto the bed — the bed, still warm, still smelling like her perfume — and pulled at the front of my coat, ripping a button off.

“It’s a kid,” he spat. “I’ll give you another one. Stop performing.”

I want you to understand: I have seen this man cry over a patient he lost at four in the morning. I coached him through his first solo case with my hand flat on his back. That man was standing over me tearing my coat open.

“My grandmother’s eyes are going,” he said. “Mine aren’t. I know exactly what you are. You let Sienna donate that kidney and then you took the credit and you took my name, and you ran her out of the country. If I’d known the truth, I’d never have married you. The Ashford heir gets born to her. Now hand over my daughter.”

I hit him.

Open palm, across the face, hard enough that my hand went numb.

“You want Lily?” I said. “Go dig for her.”

He blinked.

“She died at 4:31 this morning,” I said. “In bay four. Bleeding out of a liver you had six hours to fix. She was awake the whole time, Damien, because someone told the resident not to bother medicating her. She’s in that box you called garbage.”

For one second — one — something moved behind his eyes.

Then he laughed. Actually laughed, and shoved me off him.

“God, you’re worse than I thought.” He was pulling tissues out of the box on the nightstand, wiping his hands like he’d touched a bedpan. “Grandmother named Lily sole heir. You’re terrified that if Sienna raises her, you lose your leverage. So you hid my daughter at the old house and now you’re standing here cursing your own child for money.”

He balled up the tissues and threw them at my face.

“If it weren’t for you, Sienna and I would have three kids by now. You owe her one. That’s the whole debt, Grace. One child, and I’ll consider us square.”

He walked out.

I lay there on that bed and listened to him go down the stairs and tell her, in the doorway, in a soft voice, she’s just having an episode, don’t worry, come here.

And I did the only thing left.

I filled the fireplace in the guest room and I burned us.

Our wedding album. The photos of the three of us at the shore. Lily’s kindergarten drawings, her hospital bracelet, the notebook where I’d tracked his labs for seven years in my own handwriting. My residency letters. The little clay bowl she made me for Mother’s Day that I couldn’t take with me because it would break in a bag.

I kept two things: her raincoat for Eleanor, and the box.

If I was leaving, I was going to leave nothing behind for them to touch.

The ashes were still glowing when I heard the knock.

Not Damien’s knock. A servant’s — three taps, polite, patient.

Royce, the estate manager, was standing in the hallway in his shirtsleeves.

He was smiling at me.

And wrapped twice around his right fist, buckle swinging loose, was a leather belt.