Chapter 11
Chapter 11:
I had not touched her. I want that on the record—not because anyone was keeping one, but because in the mythology of my marriage, the truth had never once beaten a convincing lie, and I had stopped expecting it to.
Thane appeared from nowhere—or rather, from wherever he’d been standing while Ravenna choreographed her little performance—and swept her into his arms with the urgency of a man rescuing someone from a burning building rather than a self-inflicted scratch.
“Isolde, you’re insane!” He cradled Ravenna against his chest, and the look he gave me over her shoulder could have stripped paint. “If she has a scar, I’ll bury you next to your father p>
The wound was superficial. I could see that from the floor, from four feet away, through eyes blurred with tears and ash—a shallow cut that would heal in a week without intervention and in three days with a decent antiseptic. But Thane had never let evidence interfere with a verdict, and Ravenna knew her audience.
I tried to speak. The words formed, stalled, dissolved. What would I say? I didn’t touch her? She threw herself at the table? In ten years, I had learned that my testimony carried the evidentiary weight of a rumor—acknowledged, considered for half a second, then dismissed in favor of whatever story required less emotional adjustment.
He didn’t believe me. He never believed me.
I retreated.
Not to our bedroom—that had stopped being mine years ago, claimed by whichever woman most recently held his attention—but to my mother’s room at the care facility. The one place left in the world that felt adjacent to safe. I spent several days there, sleeping in the chair beside her bed, listening to the respirator’s rhythm like a lullaby performed by machinery. In. Out. Click. Hiss. The sound of borrowed time.
I should have known Ravenna would follow. People like her don’t just want to win—they want to stand over the body and make sure it stops twitching.
She arrived on a Thursday. I remember because the nurses changed shifts at three, and the hallway was empty when I heard the click of those shoes—the same red-soled heels I’d wiped clean on my knees—approaching with the measured cadence of someone who has planned exactly what they’re about to do.
She pushed open the door without knocking.
“So this is your mom.” Ravenna leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, eyes traveling over my mother’s motionless form with the curiosity of someone examining an exhibit at a museum. “How sad. Lying there like a vegetable. Can she even hear us p>
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My mother’s eyes were open, as always. Focused on nothing, as always.
“Get out, Ravenna p>
She didn’t get out. Instead, she walked to the bed—slowly, letting her fingertips trail along the guardrail—and stopped at the nightstand where the respirator sat, its cables coiling down to the wall outlet like a lifeline, which is exactly what it was.
Her hand closed around the power cable.
“Don’t touch that.” I was on my feet instantly, crossing the room, but she was closer and faster and had the advantage of not caring about consequences.
“You scarred my face.” She yanked the cable. The plug resisted—one of those hospital-grade connections designed for exactly this scenario—and then gave way with a sound like a small bone breaking. The machine stuttered, wheezed, and went silent.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
“Ravenna!” I lunged for the plug, scrambling to reconnect it, my hands shaking so badly that I missed the socket twice before finding it. The machine hummed back to life—but the rhythm had changed. The hiss was there, the click was there, but something underneath had shifted, like a song played in the wrong key.
I reached for my mother’s hand.