She’s tired of fighting. Tired of resisting the inevitable.
She is slipping back to who she was.
The girl I bought, the girl I mastered, the one who trembled when I first touched her.
Motherhood has softened the sharp, fractured edges I created. Or perhaps my unwavering devotion, my patience, is finally sanding them down. Every time she sees me with Caspian a little more of the ice around her heart melts, I am sure of it.
This is it. This is the key.
This love I have for him, this fierce, possessive, overwhelming tenderness is my greatest weapon in winning her back. She cannot deny the sight of me, her monster, brought to his knees by the weight of our son. She sees the care I take, the way I never put him down unless it’s absolutely necessary, the way I watch over his every breath.
How can she not forgive me, when the living proof of our union is so perfectly, beautifully loved?
The nurse smiles at me from the rocking chair. “He’s never fussy with you, Mr Macrae. It’s like he knows his father’s voice.”
A surge of pride, warm and potent floods my chest. This is approval, this is normalcy. This is the life I have built, stone by stone, and it is holding. “He’s a good boy,” I say, my voice thick with an emotion that surprises me with its genuineness. For a moment, the performance and the reality merge into one. Iama father. Thisismy son. And Gracewillbe my wife in truth, not just in name.
I look back to the doorway to share this moment with her, to see the softening in her eyes, the ghost of a smile that has been playing on her lips these past few days.
Only, the doorway is empty.
A flicker of something cold touches the base of my spine. It’s nothing, I tell myself. She’s tired, she’s gone to lie down. She’s getting a glass of water. But the narrative of peaceful reconciliation I was spinning so perfectly moments ago frays at the edges.
I cross the room and gently place Caspian back into his crib. He stirs, letting out a small, disgruntled sigh, but doesn’t wake. Carefully, I trail my finger down his cheek in a silent promise.
I will secure your world. I will secure your mother too.
I walk out of the nursery, my steps measured but my heart has begun a slow, heavy drum against my ribs. The master suite is just down the hall. The door is ajar. I push it open.
The room is vast, bathed in the late afternoon light that streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The bed is neatly made, the silken covers undisturbed. She is not here.
The cold feeling in my spine intensifies, spreading, coalescing into a hard, leaden knot in my gut. This feeling… I know this feeling. It is the primal knowledge of a predator when his prey has slipped the trap.
The bathroom.
I don’t walk. I stride, my calm veneer cracking with every step. The door is closed, and there is no sound from within. No running water. Nothing.
I don’t knock. I turn the handle and push the door open.
The scene imprints itself on my brain in a single, horrifying snapshot. Grace is sitting on the edge of the large, freestanding bathtub. She is still dressed in her silk dressing gown but in her hand, held loosely between her fingers, is a razor; one of my old razors. A straight razor, with a handle of polished obsidian and a blade of wicked, gleaming steel.
She isn’t moving. She’s just staring at her reflection in the mirrored wall, the blade resting on her thigh. She looks serene. Resolved.
The world tilts on its axis. The carefully constructed fantasy of the last hour, the doting father, the reconciled family shatters into a million sharp-edged pieces.
She wasn’t softening. She wasn’t surrendering. The bitch was saying goodbye.
“Grace.” Her name is a guttural sound, ripped from a place deep inside me I thought I had buried.
She doesn’t startle. Slowly, as if moving through water, she turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are not weary anymore. They are empty. Vast. Like the deep darkness of a twilight sky just after the sun has vanished, leaving nothing but an immense, chilling void.
“I was only shaving my legs,” she says. Her voice is quiet, flat. Devoid of any emotion whatsoever.
It’s a lie. A pathetic, transparent lie. She hasn’t even run the water. There’s no shaving cream. I look from the lethal blade to her face, and Iknow.
I can see it in the terrifying calm of her expression. The game is up. Not my game. Hers. The game of pretending to live.
A rage, cold and absolute, obliterates the last vestiges of my paternal joy. It’s not anger at her. It’s anger at her defiance. At this ultimate rejection. After everything I have given her. My home, my security, my child, my fuckinglove.
