Crystal
1249 Words
LAUREN
I sat with that for a moment.
The man who had held me and had cried — real tears — while I bled and shook and told him I was sorry. The man who had kissed my forehead and said we'll try again while knowing, the entire time, exactly why we would have to.
He had not been grieving with me.
He had been watching me grieve alone.
I thought about the first time.
The first bathroom floor. How I had turned my face into his chest and apologised. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know why my body did this to us.”
And he had held the back of my head with one hand and said, “Don't. Don't you dare apologise to me.”
He had said it like he meant it.
Then the rage rose.
It rose up hot and fast, burning through my entire body. My teeth ground against each other with the effort of keeping it down.
I had spent seven hundred days apologising to a man for a failure he was manufacturing in my own kitchen.
I hadn't been losing babies; I had been a crime scene.
I don’t know how long I sat there inside that thought.
"I need you to stop taking it," Dr. Anthony said.
I nodded. But as I stood up from the chair, I knew I would do more than that. I would turn into something that couldn't be poisoned anymore.
The ride home wasn’t quick enough. I sat in the back of the cab with the supplement bottle in my lap, turning it over and over in my hands like it owed me an answer.
The house was too quiet when I got home.
It was always too quiet when Coldene was away. Too large. I had grown up crowded, loud, full of people who mostly didn’t give a hoot about me, and I'd thought — when I first walked through these doors after the inheritance — that the silence was a luxury.
Now the quiet felt like a haunted place.
I thought about calling Reign. But I couldn’t find the words. I wasn’t ready to say anything out loud yet.
I went upstairs to take off my earrings. My hands were shaking so hard the clasp slipped, and my arm swung out, knocking the shelf above Coldene's nightstand.
His shelf. His space.
"Work things," he'd said once, early on. And something in his voice had made me never reach for it again.
The small box at the edge tipped. Unlocked — he never left it unlocked. Papers slid out.
I picked them up automatically to stack them back.
A receipt caught my eye.
I picked it up. A date printed clearly at the top.
Three weeks ago. A restaurant in Detroit.
Twenty minutes away.
My heart missed a beat, then did a slow, sickening pull in my chest.
Three weeks ago, Coldene was supposed to be in Boston for a tech conference. He had called me from a "hotel room," his voice thick with fake exhaustion, telling me how much he wished he was home rubbing my feet and talking to my belly. I had fallen asleep clutching the phone, feeling so lucky to have him.
This receipt wasn't from Boston. It was from a bistro three blocks from Gilda's apartment.
I set it down slowly.
Earrings completely forgotten, I reached for the next paper — pulled by something I couldn't name.
An old photo slid out first.
A younger version of Coldene. Ten years younger, maybe more. Leaner. A different city behind him, somewhere that wasn't here. At the bottom of the photo, in small neat handwriting —
Ellis Atticus.
I stared at it.
Then I reached for the stapled document beneath it. A legal deed for a property I didn't recognise. My hands were shaking as I flipped through the pages. On the third page I found my own signature.
I didn't remember signing this.
I flipped to the final page.
The same name on the signature line. Above it, below it, on every document in the pile.
Not Coldene Whitmore.
Ellis Atticus.
I whispered it.
I felt my legs turn to jelly.
Not all at once. They just... stopped holding me. I went down slowly against the shelf until I was sitting on the floor with the document in my lap and my back against the wall and I could not remember deciding to sit down.
I sat there for a long time before I could read the rest.
Coldene Whitmore didn't exist.
The man who slept beside me. The man I had promised to grow old with—he was a ghost. A character. A long-con performance played by a predator named Ellis.
Then the memory hit me.
I had heard that name before.
My nephew’s birthday party. The lake house. Gilda, my stepsister, flushed with wine, reaching across the table.
"Ellis, would you pass the—"
Gilda had stopped. Looked up. Laughed. "God, I have no idea where that came from. Too much wine before noon."
Coldene had laughed. I had laughed. There was no reason for the world to stop.
Until now.
Gilda hadn't slipped. She had been gloating. They had both been sitting there, right in front of me, sharing a secret identity like a private joke while I served them drinks.
I remembered something else now.
Our wedding. Coldene's family had not come—a falling out, he had said, the kind that runs deep. Don't push it, Lauren, it's painful.
Just one brother had made it. A tall, quiet man named Scott who sat at the back of the room and left before the cake was cut.
A man who looked so little like Coldene that my friends had whispered: "Are you sure they're related?"
I had defended Coldene that night. Siblings don't always look alike.
I stared at the document in my lap.
My fourth baby was gone. My husband was a ghost with a name I didn't know.
And Gilda—my own sister—had known his name for God knows how long.
Something had been looming in the dark between those two while I was losing my children.
I set the document down slowly. The grief that had been sitting open and wet inside my chest all morning went very, very still. Then it hardened into something else entirely.
Someone had been making sure—carefully, quietly, consistently—that my womb stayed empty.
I didn't have all of it yet.
But I had enough.
My phone buzzed on the bed behind me. I turned.
The screen lit up with one word.
Coldene ❤️
I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. I wiped my face clean. I smoothed my hair back. I looked at a woman who was done bleeding quietly.
I picked up the phone.
Cleared the gravel from my throat.
Pressed accept.
"Hey, baby," I said, letting just enough tremor into my voice — the sound of a woman wrecked by grief, suspecting nothing. "Are you off the plane?"
I waited for the lie.
I was ready for it now.
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