In the hallway mirror, you catch a glimpse of yourself.
Split lip. Cheek beginning to swell. Hair half-fallen from the clip you shoved it into at the hospital around five that afternoon when the ER got slammed. Tired blue eyes set in a face you barely recognize some nights. You look like a woman who has been surviving so long she forgot survival wasn’t supposed to be a permanent address.
In the kitchen, you open the refrigerator.
Eggs. Potatoes. Bell peppers. A marinated pork loin you prepped the night before because Ethan’s mother once complained that your dinners were “fine, but not memorable.” Lettuce. Tomatoes. Sour cream. Butter. Everything ready, because even when you work twelve-hour shifts, you still somehow prepare in advance for the moods and appetites of people who treat your effort like a minimum requirement for being allowed to exist.
Your hands shake as you peel the potatoes.
Not just from fear. Fear is there, yes, cold and old and well-practiced. But underneath it, deeper and steadier, is something else. Something like a door closing. Something like the last thin strand of a rope finally snapping under weight it should never have been asked to carry.
Six months earlier, you would have obeyed on autopilot.
You would have moved through the motions of dinner and hosting the way nurses sometimes move through emergency protocols even while their minds are fraying. Set the table. Smile carefully. Hide the bruise under concealer. Ignore the way Ethan’s mother, Diane, always found elegant ways to call you lacking. Ignore the brother, Ryan, who laughed at cruel things because he had learned from the family that a woman in pain was often just a punchline with eyelashes. Ignore Ashley, Ethan’s sister, who had the polished moral emptiness of someone who mistakes loyalty to blood for virtue.
But tonight is not the same.
In the lining of your purse, the one still spilled in the hallway, there is a small flash drive wrapped in a pharmacy receipt. In the junk drawer beneath the dish towels, hidden under a bag of lentils, there is a brown file folder. In your coat pocket there is a folded copy of a police incident intake form you planned to submit tomorrow morning. Planned.
