Julian called me the following morning.
“You’re alive,” he said. He sounded almost amused, the tone of a man who had bet on a horse and was mildly surprised it finished the race.
I said nothing. I just listened to the steady beep of my heart monitor.
“Listen to me carefully, Clara,” he continued, his voice dropping into a smooth, practiced cadence. “You were disoriented after childbirth. You’ve been emotional. If you start telling people I tried to hurt you, I’ll tell them you ran out into the storm in some hormonal, postpartum fit. Everyone knows you’ve been unstable lately.”
“You left your son in a blizzard,” I whispered, my throat raw.
“Our son,” he corrected sharply. “Don’t get dramatic. You lived.”
Then he hung up.
For weeks, that sentence sat under my skin like a shard of dirty glass. You lived.
Six weeks later, I was physically stronger. I will not say I was healed, because healed implies a return to softness. What I was now had sharp, jagged edges.
Julian announced his upcoming wedding to Victoria Sterling with a glossy magazine spread and a laughable, nauseating caption about “finding real peace after a season of chaos.” Victoria was the heiress to Sterling Global Investments. She wore a diamond the size of a lie on her finger.
Julian had moved with blistering speed, because men like him always do after committing an act of violence. They do not rest. They bury. He had sold my jewelry, drained our joint accounts, and filed emergency custody papers with the state, claiming I was an unfit mother and a danger to the baby due to severe postpartum psychosis.