He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 04

He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 04

Ten seconds,” Royce said.

He didn’t step into the room. He just filled the doorway with that belt hanging off his knuckles.

“Miss Vaughn’s ankles are swollen. Dr. Ashford says you’ve had a baby, so you’ll know how to rub them

properly. They’re at the pool house.” He checked his watch. “Ten seconds, Mrs. Ashford. Or I start counting

with this.”

Outside it was forty-one degrees and raining sideways.

My daughter’s ashes were in my closet, hidden inside a winter coat.

I made it to the stairs in eleven seconds.

The belt taught me about the extra one.

I want to explain something about my body, because you need it to understand the rest.

One kidney. A pregnancy at twenty-five that I carried while managing a man’s psychiatric medication and a hospital’s outcomes data. Two years of nursing, no supplements, no follow-up, because Damien’s calendar was the only calendar. My bone density scan at thirty read like a woman of sixty. In cold weather, my hips ache so badly that I’d learned to just stay indoors when it rained.

That night I walked three hundred yards through freezing rain with my back opened up in stripes.

I could see them from the path. Damien and Sienna under the pool house overhang, a patio heater roaring, a cashmere blanket over her legs, wine for him, sparkling water for her, Somebody’s idea of a magazine spread.

He looked up and saw me – soaked, barefoot in the grass, blood running down the back of my dress and

pinking the water on the flagstones.

He paused. I saw it. Some old, buried part of him registered that something was wrong.

And then his face closed.

“Unbelievable,” he said. “The victim act. Sienna is the one in pain here, Grace. Are you going to stand there dripping or are you going to be useful? Kneel down.”

I knelt.

My knees hit stone. My hands were shaking so hard from cold that when I touched her foot, she shrieked and

yanked it back.

“Oh my God, they’re like ice!” Sienna clutched her stomach, eyes filling instantly, on cue. “Damien, she did that on purpose. Pregnant women can’t get chilled, everyone knows that-”

He kicked me in the chest.

Not a shove. A kick. I went backward off the flagstones into the flowerbed, into the mud, and lay there in the

rain with my ribs on fire while my husband of seven years stood over me.

“You’ve had a child,” he said. “You know what cold does. You have no compassion in you at all do you? You

are exactly what she said you were.”

Then he picked Sienna up like a bride and carried her inside, and someone turned the patio heater off, and I lay in the flowerbed in the dark.

I woke up in my bedroom. Someone had put me on top of the covers, still wet. The clock said 6:10 a.m. There were bruises coming up on my sternum in the shape of a shoe.

The fireplace was cold. I checked the closet. The box was still there.

At 6:40 the door came off its hinges.

Damien filled the doorway, gray-faced, holding a lab printout in his fist.

“Sienna lost the baby,” he said.

“Sienn

I sat up slowly. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.” He crossed the room in three steps and slapped me hard enough to split my lip. “You dragged yourself through the rain and put your frozen hands on her. You wanted this. You planned it.”

Behind him, a man in a white coat hovered in the hall. I’d never seen him before. Ashford Memorial has two hundred and twelve physicians and I know most of them by name, and I did not know him.

“The pregnancy was already fragile,” the stranger said to the floor. “Any cold exposure, any physical stress –

that would do it.”

Which is not how miscarriage works. Which is not how anything works.

I looked at that man and I understood: he was bought. And then I understood something bigger, something that made the room go white at the edges.

If she’d bought this doctor, she could buy a resident.

She could buy the resident who charted my daughter’s pain scores as comfortable, no analgesia indicated.

“Damien,” I said. “Who was the resident on Lily’s chart?”

He wasn’t listening. He had my hair in his fist, and he was pulling me toward the stairs.

“Downstairs,” he said. “You’re going to look Sienna in the eye. And then you’re going to pay for what you took.”