Beneath the thin veneer of static, I could distinctly hear the rhythmic, undeniably soothing crash of ocean waves. Laced into the surf was not my husband’s voice, but the high-pitched, champagne-soaked laughter of a young woman.
“Stop blowing up his phone, will you?” the female voice sneered, the words slurred with alcohol and dripping with cruel amusement. “He’s in the shower, old wife. We’re in Maui. Stop being so desperate and let him enjoy his vacation.”
Click. The dial tone hummed in my ear, a flatlining sound of its own.
I did not scream. I did not hurl the device against the hospital wall. I simply walked back into the trauma room on numb legs. The attending physician had just stepped back, his eyes lowered in that universal gesture of defeat. I collapsed beside her hospital bed, weeping onto the back of her rapidly cooling hand. “I am so sorry, Margaret. He isn’t coming.”
That was when the impossible occurred. Her fingers, which should have been devoid of all motor function due to her severe strokes, twitched.
Margaret’s eyes fluttered open. She had heard the piercing, mocking voice of Chloe, the mistress, echoing from the speaker of my phone just moments before. A terrifying, unnatural fire ignited in Margaret’s cloudy eyes. It was not a look of sorrow; it was a look of pure, unadulterated maternal rage.
She squeezed my hand with a desperate strength. Beneath the plastic oxygen mask, her pale lips moved. No sound escaped, but after studying her face every day for twenty years, I read the words perfectly: Destroy him.
