The October rain didn’t fall so much as it attacked, thick sheets slapping the street, hammering the porch steps, turning the driveway into a shallow river that reflected the warm light spilling from an open front door. Daniel Harrison barely noticed any of it. His chest was too tight, his jaw too clenched, his hands too full of fury and pride to register the cold seeping through his Italian loafers. He stood at the top of the steps of the modest two-story house he’d purchased with a thirty-year mortgage, the kind of house his mother had called “a starter” in the same tone she used for “cheap,” and he did what he’d rehearsed in his mind for weeks. He grabbed the final suitcase, the last piece of his wife’s life inside his life, and hurled it into the rain hard enough to make the leather crack when it hit the concrete. It tumbled end over end, splashed into a puddle, and landed with a sound that felt final.
Behind him, Victoria laughed.
Not a nervous laugh. Not a surprised laugh. A satisfied laugh, like applause at a show she’d paid to see. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and the other curled possessively around Daniel’s bicep, her manicured nails pressing into him as if she needed proof he was still hers. The porch light turned raindrops on her hair into glitter; the designer perfume that clung to her mixed with wet asphalt and made Daniel think, irrationally, of a flower trying to bloom in a gutter.
“God, Daniel,” Victoria purred, “I can’t believe you put up with her for three years.”
Her voice carried that familiar blend of amusement and cruelty that had once lit something reckless in him. Tonight it didn’t. Tonight it made something twist in his stomach, small and sharp, like a warning he didn’t want to hear.
“Look at her,” Victoria added, tilting her chin toward the driveway. “She’s not even fighting back. What kind of woman just stands there?”
Elena stood at the bottom of the driveway where the streetlight was dimmer, where the rain hit her like punishment. One hand cradled her swollen belly, six months pregnant and unmistakably exhausted, while the other hung loosely at her side as if she’d finally grown tired of clenching it into a fist. Her hair was plastered to her face; her maternity dress, the kind sold in discount stores, clung to her frame. If Daniel had looked only at fabric and water and posture, he would have told himself the story he’d been telling for years: struggling wife, grateful to be chosen, too small to demand more.
