Chapter 2
I installed it beneath the kitchen island on a Tuesday afternoon while Dominic thought I was cleaning. The switch was on the underside, positioned at a point my left hand could reach naturally while my right hand was occupied with something else. Three presses activated the camera, began encrypted transmission to cloud storage, and delivered a prerecorded emergency message with our address and a live video link to Detective Chloe Park, the domestic violence investigator I had first contacted through a hotline four months earlier and who had spent those four months helping me build an exit that would hold.
Chloe had a specific instruction I had memorized like a phone number: when the signal comes through, we move immediately. Not in an hour. Not pending review. Immediately.
I pressed the switch three times on a Thursday evening, with a frying pan in my right hand and Dominic's hand forcing mine toward the burner.
The pain arrived before I had fully processed the decision. A burn is not an incremental experience. It is immediate and total, the specific kind of information that the body transmits at a volume that overrides everything else, and my knees buckled with the completeness of it and the pan came down with the ruined steak and the hot grease across the floor and I was on the tile with my hand pressed against my chest before Dominic had released me.
He did not look down.
Victoria stepped over me to reach the wine bottle.
I heard the pour. I heard her glass set back on the marble. I heard her voice, the voice she used when she was performing patience for an audience that did not exist.
"She needs to learn where she belongs."
From the living room, Arthur raised the television volume.
I lay on the kitchen floor and I felt the burn pulsing in my hand and I felt something else underneath it, something that had been in pieces for eighteen months and had finally arranged itself into a single coherent shape. Not anger exactly. Not grief. Something colder than either. The specific quality of a woman who has been calculating and is now finished calculating and is simply waiting for the math to complete.
Dominic grabbed my hair and pulled me up.
I made my voice shake. It was not difficult because my voice was already shaking. The shaking was real. I used the real shaking and let him hear it as fear, which was what he had trained himself to hear, which was the last misreading he was going to make in this kitchen.
May you like
"Please," I said. "My hand."
"Stop performing," Victoria said.
