Our Marriage Rotted in the Eighth Year

Chapter 4

Then one day a migraine sent me home early, and the moment I opened the bedroom door, I snapped, because Dominic was in our bed with a young waitress. I screamed and charged at them, snatching up a crystal lamp and swinging it at the woman, but Dominic rolled over to shield her with his body, and when the lamp cut his shoulder, he shoved me away in a fury.

That night he decided to make me "calm down" for good, and without a trace of mercy he signed an involuntary commitment order and had me hauled to a private psychiatric hospital outside Kingsport. Those three days were the darkest nightmare of my life, surrounded by cold machines, high-voltage shocks tearing through my brain, and heavy doses of medication that left me barely able to think.

Three days later I was returned to the apartment, where the front door stood open and Dominic hadn't even bothered to change the sheets, so that used condoms and discarded clothes littered the floor. He looked at me coolly. "Stay quiet, Aria, and this house is still yours."

I leaned against the hallway wall like a soulless puppet, the home that had once felt so warm now lying in ruins around me.

I didn't cry or scream, and late that night I took a sharp paring knife and cut deep into my wrist. By the time Dominic opened the door, the smell of blood hung in the hallway, and I was slumped in a corner, my vision fading as red spread across the cashmere carpet beneath me.

Dominic's terrified shout filled the hallway as he rushed over and clamped both hands around my wrist.

When I woke at the hospital, he was sitting beside my bed, exhausted and unshaven, and he seized my hand with a trembling voice. "I'm sorry, Aria. You scared me. Please stop hurting yourself."

The red in his eyes took me back to our hardest days in Riverside eight years ago, when we'd been too poor to afford fever medicine and he'd held me tight, sobbing and begging me not to leave him. The sweeter the memory, the more poisonous the present became.

I touched his face and whispered, "Do you still love me?"

He covered my palm with frantic kisses, his tears falling onto the sheets. "Silly girl, you'll always be the woman I love most."

While I stayed in the hospital, he became the boy who'd once seen no one but me, caring for me with painstaking tenderness and holding me close at night, and I thought the storm had finally passed.

It didn't last, because nothing between us could be put back together, and not long after I left the hospital he found someone new—a woman named Isla. She wore a simple white dress, looked at me with wide, innocent eyes, and spoke to me like we were close, and for one stunned second I was looking at myself eight years earlier, newly arrived in Kingsport.

Dominic immediately stepped in front of her, shielding her with his tall frame, his eyes full of warning. "Isla is innocent. If you're angry, take it out on me, not her."

For her, he ate an entire spread of spicy food despite the stomach ulcers that had plagued him since childhood, had a severe gastric hemorrhage, and ended up hospitalized. He transferred a 10% stake in the company to her without hesitation, and on their 100-day anniversary he staged an all-night fireworks display over the Bellmere River.

I stood alone at the window and watched the fireworks break overhead, each one breaking something else inside me, because years ago, under a bridge, he'd lit a half-burned sparkler he found on the ground and promised me, with tears in his eyes, "Aria, someday I'll give you the biggest fireworks show Crown District has ever seen."

He hadn't forgotten—he'd simply taken the promise he made to me and used it to light another woman's sky.

What finally destroyed me was the lavish wedding he threw for Isla, when Dominic invited the city's elite to an estate in Northshore and publicly announced that Isla was the only true love of his life. When I saw her smiling in her wedding gown, I broke, and I put on my old wedding dress, gripped a paring knife, and stormed into the ballroom like a vengeful ghost. "Dominic! Why don't you want me anymore? She's nothing but the woman I used to be!"

His first instinct was to pull Isla behind him, disgust filling his eyes. "Get her out of here!"

I fought wildly to reach them, and when Dominic strode forward to wrestle the knife away and shoved me in the struggle, my body pitched backward and I tumbled down the tall marble staircase. Pain exploded deep in my abdomen, and blood spread fast across my white gown, turning it a horrifying dark red, and as my vision dissolved and the dark closed in, I heard Dominic screaming my name.

I shut my eyes with only one thought left: the love that had tangled us for eight years had finally rotted beyond saving.