We sat there for a long time. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us touched.
I tugged my coat up around my shoulders, drawing my knees tighter against my chest.
I stared out at the skyline: dark buildings against a darker sky. No lights. No movement. Just the husk of a city that had stopped breathing.
I waited for him to ask the careful questions that would signal the end. But he just sat there, breathing beside me. His silence wasn’t pity. It was…waiting. And in that stillness, I decided something. If this were the end, if the dead below were all that was left of tomorrow, perhaps the truth deserved to be spoken out loud at least once. Not the official story, but the real one.
I didn’t look at Finn when I started talking. My courage had limits.
“I met John when I was twenty.”
My voice came as if leaving a voicemail for someone I didn’t know.
“He was older, confident. He had a way of making you believe he’d figured out the world, and that you were lucky he’d let you in on the secret.” A short, sharp breath escaped me—not quite a laugh. “I thought that meant wisdom. Turns out it just meant he’d had more time to learn how to hide what he really was.”
The wind pulled at my hair. I tucked it back with shaking fingers and continued.
“We moved fast. By the time I turned twenty-two, we were married, and Lily was on the way.”
“Before… before Lily, I told myself there were no signs. Maybe there weren’t. Or more likely, I’d already been trained not to see them. He raised his voice once in a while—slammed a door, was quiet in a way that made the house feel smaller—but nothing I would have called wrong or dangerous.”
I swallowed. The next part lived somewhere deeper, uglier than anything I’d let myself speak in years.
“After Lily arrived, he lost interest in me, physically.” The words came out with clinical precision, as if I could manage the damage if I managed the delivery. “He said I’d gotten fat. Made comments about how I looked like a grown woman now—they were odd things that I didn’t understand at the time.”
I paused, drew a breath that shuddered.
“Sex became nothing but pain. And then it stopped being consensual.”
Neither of us moved.
I kept going. If I stopped now, I’d never start again.
“He’d escalate every time. Like whatever he’d done before stopped being enough, so he had to push further. Toward the end, he started cutting me. Burning me. He told me I owed him this—that enduring it owed him something, and he’d never explained.”
My hand drifted without thought to my left side, fingers hovering over the fabric above the scars beneath without making contact.
“He cut deep sometimes. Deep enough that he had to stitch me up himself afterward. He was a veterinarian—” A sound escaped me—something that wasn’t a laugh. Something darker and emptier than that. “He was good enough to keep me out of an emergency room, where people would ask questions he didn’t want me to answer. He understood where to cut, so the markswould never show above a collar or past a sleeve. Every scar on my body sits below the neckline. He calculated it. Designed it so I could walk through the world looking whole while I rotted underneath.”
Silence. Just the wind, the dead below, and the man beside me—listening without moving.
I took a breath. Held it. Let it go.
“The night I killed him.”
I’d braced myself for Finn to flinch. To stiffen, to put a little more distance between his body and mine.
He didn’t move.
“The law thinks it’s straightforward,” I said. “Self-defense. Clean and uncomplicated. Because that’s what I let them believe.”
I closed my eyes.
“But the truth—the truth that no one knows—”
My voice dropped to a whisper. The words I’d never spoken aloud to another living soul climbed up my throat.
“I came home from the store and heard him.”
