After They Ate Me Alive, I Fought Back

Chapter 3—They’d Already Started

I felt Nathan’s body go rigid against me.

Good. Let him be the one off-balance for once.

I kept my face buried in his chest and kept going, voice soft and wet, the way a woman who’s just decided to sacrifice herself for her family might sound. “The truth is, I love you. And I’d raise your brother as my own in a heartbeat—especially when money isn’t the problem. But, baby, I’ve spent five years trying to get pregnant. If one day I finally do, and I can’t give that child a hundred percent of myself because I’ve poured it all into someone else’s—isn’t that unfair to our baby?”

I tilted my head up, blinking through the tears I’d summoned on cue.

Nathan stared down at me, and I watched him try to work out what he was looking at. This was not the plan. He’d expected me to fight the divorce. To beg. To cave the way I’d caved to Doris a hundred times, because that’s what I’d always done—for him.

“That would be unfair,” he said carefully. “Yes.”

Hook. Line.

“So do what you said.” I let my voice go steady, almost brave. “You walk away with nothing. We get divorced.”

His pupils flared. He opened his mouth, closed it. “Baby—“

There it is. He’s afraid he’s played it too well.

“You’re changing your mind now?” I let my smile turn brittle. “You don’t want the divorce anymore?”

He weighed it, the calculations moving behind his eyes like a man reading a balance sheet. Then he shook his head, then nodded. “Of course I don’t want it. But to protect you—“

“Then let’s do a fake divorce.”

His expression went slack for a beat. Then something lit up in it. “A fake divorce?”

“Exactly what you said.” I reached up and smoothed a wrinkle in his collar, the picture of a devoted wife. “All the assets go to me. You sign away everything, you move out. Once your mom sees she can’t lean on you anymore, she’ll go find the baby’s actual father instead of dumping the whole thing on us.”

I let my hand rest over his heart. “We divorce on paper, but we don’t separate. We still live together. We still love each other. And the day I finally give you a baby, we go to the courthouse and get married again.”

It was the opposite of everything he’d expected me to say. He didn’t know what to do with it.

He tried to kiss me. I turned my head, just enough, so his lips caught the corner of my mouth.

Once, his closeness had been honey. I’d craved it the way an addict craves a fix.

Now it was arsenic. I wanted to scrub my skin off where he’d touched me.

“Go bring your mom and the baby upstairs first,” I said. “It’s cold out. One old woman and one newborn, standing around in December—they’ll catch their death. I’ll draft the settlement tonight, and tomorrow morning we file.”

He made a show of not wanting to go alone, of worrying about me, and I made a show of shooing him off. The second he was gone, the smile dropped off my face.

---

Doris came through the door already apologizing.

“Elaine—I mean, sweetheart—“ she’d never once gotten my name right, “—my hormones are all over the place after the birth, and the menopause on top of it, and I’m not myself. Don’t you take a single word I said to heart. I’m sorry.”

I almost laughed out loud.

Postpartum hormones. Menopause. A woman who’d never finished a day of school in her life does not pull those words out of the air. Nathan had fed them to her, line by line, on the walk upstairs. That’s why he hadn’t wanted me coming down with him—couldn’t have me listening in on the rehearsal.

Doris took my faint smile for forgiveness, plopped the sleeping baby onto the couch, and scurried into the kitchen to brew my supplement.

Nathan kissed my forehead. “I’ll be back tonight,” he said, and left with a look of such tender regret I could have framed it.

The moment the door clicked, the smile on my face turned to ice.

I looked down at the baby.

I used to hate children. Loud, grabby, unreasonable little things. But then my parents died, and Nathan loved me, and somewhere along the way I’d started wanting one—to prove something to the dead, maybe, or just to have one person in the world who was mine. I’d dreamed about it. A chubby, bright-eyed baby with my eyes and his father’s steadiness. I’d wake up and tell Nathan about the dream, and he’d hold me and say, Soon. Soon, baby.

Well. The baby came.

It just wasn’t mine.

And the old hatred came back like it had never left.

Still, I crossed the room to him. And while Doris’s back was turned, I reached down and plucked a few fine hairs from the baby’s head.

He woke. His whole face went red. And then he screamed.

I’d just slipped the hairs into my pocket when Doris came flying out of the kitchen. “What happened?”

For a second I froze. The baby hadn’t done anything wrong. The baby was the only innocent person in this entire house.

But innocence wasn’t going to save any of us.

“I just wanted to touch his face,” I said, keeping my voice even. “I touched him, and he started crying.”

Doris shoved a steaming mug at me and scooped the baby up, cooing. “This one’s exactly like Nathan was as a baby. Light sleeper. Any little thing wakes him. Drink your supplement while it’s hot.”

I looked down at the mug.

The liquid was black. It smelled like wet earth and something faintly chemical. I’d been drinking it for six months, ever since Nathan found some so-called fertility whisperer who’d diagnosed me with a “cold womb” and prescribed a custom blend to fix it.

Six months. And the side effects had crept in right on schedule—the drowsiness, the constant trips to the bathroom. I’d blamed the pregnancy.

But six months ago, the woman on the other end of that message had already been halfway through her own pregnancy. And Nathan had kept dragging me to doctors the whole time. I’d never been able to square that circle.

I couldn’t drink this. Not one more drop. Pregnant or not, poison was poison, and I was done putting it in my body.

“Still too hot,” I said, and carried the mug toward the bedroom like I was going to let it cool.

I sealed the baby’s hairs into a plastic bag. I poured the supplement down the toilet. I watched it swirl away and flushed.

When I came back out, Doris and the baby were gone. The front door was hanging open.

I started to close it—and froze.

Doris was just outside, phone pressed to her ear, her voice low and venomous.

“Not two minutes after you left, she made the baby cry. His head’s red where I think she hit him!”

A beat. Nathan, on the other end.

Then: “She’s in the bedroom. After she takes that stuff she’s either in the bathroom or passed out, she won’t be coming out for a while. But I’m telling you—this is the most important stretch. You make damn sure she drinks it. Don’t you let this slip now.”

The world tilted.

If finding out Nathan was cheating and planning to rob me blind had made me angry, this—this made my blood run cold.

The supplement wasn’t just a lie.

It was a murder weapon. Slow, patient, dressed up as a wellness ritual.

And suddenly the thing I’d never understood snapped into focus. Why he’d kept taking me to doctors. Why he’d smiled through every appointment. Why he’d held my hand and said soon.

They weren’t waiting for me to have a baby.

They were waiting for me to die.

Just like the women in the news. Just like the stories I’d skimmed past, horrified, never once imagining I’d end up inside one.

I backed into the bedroom before she could see me, my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.

They’ve already started. So now, so do I.

Don’t spook them. Gather everything. Take them down in one stroke.

I crossed to the window. And that’s when I saw it—the snow, falling thick and fast now. The first real snow of the year, blanketing the city in white, quiet and final, like a sheet being pulled up over something.

Was the sky mourning me? Or marking me as another woman who’d never get to tell her side of it?

I opened the window. Held out my hand. Caught a single flake.

And as it melted into nothing against my palm, the idea came to me—whole, cold, and perfect.