She took the cup of tea and pressed it to her lips.
“Good?” Tom asked.
“Good,” she confirmed.
He smiled at her cautiously.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
She looked at him, cautious herself.
“Do you still think so?”
“Even more than ever,” he affirmed. He leaned onto the table; his arms crossed in front of him. “I messed up, V,” he said, using the nickname that he’d established for her long ago. Something that she hadn’t heard in years. “I want to make things right between us.”
“Do you mean that?” Vanessa asked.
“I mean it with the entirety of my being,” Tom said, his eyes never straying from hers.
“I do, too,” she said.
“I don’t care that this baby isn’t mine,” Tom spoke the words that Vanessa had longed to hear. “I want us to be a family. I don’t care what happened before.”
“Oh, Tom,” she said.
They finished the tea, talking to each other as though they’d been apart for months. They spent the afternoon curled up on the couch after having sex. Glorious make-up sex that can only be achieved after severely wounding each other. Vanessa thought about that as she ran a lazy hand over Tom’s chest.
“I need to run an errand,” he said.
Vanessa nodded and Tom got up and got dressed. He left her there, running off to do who knew what.
Vanessa stayed on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, making shapes out of the arbitrary lines that she found there. It was only enough to keep her entertained for so long. She needed to get up and move.
Though she hadn’t been pregnant long, she had adapted to the idea of herself carrying a child quite quickly. She loved the thought of being pregnant. The messiness that came with the facts surrounding her child’s conception were something that she tried to mow down out of her mind whenever they cropped up.
Today, though, it seemed like everything was going to be okay.
After Tom had been gone for a little while, she got in the shower.
She didn’t wait until the water was warm. Instead, she stepped in under a cool stream, the temperature shocking her skin and making her gasp. It was one of the creature comforts available to her that still helped to make her feel alive. She cherished it.
Under the shower head she washed her hair and her face. She moved on to shave her legs and it was then that she felt the first cramp in her abdomen.
“Oh, my God,” she said to herself. The words came out immediately, the pain was so great. It felt like a period cramp but more intense. It seized her and wouldn’t let go. She grasped at the handle on the shower door and another one seized her uterus. Something was happening.
She fell to her knees in the shower. The water ran warm around her by now. She knelt in the shower for a moment. She felt dizzy. And then the room went black.
Vanessa woke, the water running cold over her body. She lay in a heap, her legs curled beneath her in the shower, her hair being tugged at by the drain. Pink water gathered around her face. She’d passed out. And the water ran with blood.
She looked around her.
Red stained the wall behind her. A hand print. Her own. She reached between her legs and felt a slickness that could only be blood. The thought made her stomach turn. She yanked her hair from the drain, part of it ripping itself from her scalp. She cried out in pain, reaching for the frayed ends of her hair.
The strawberry blonde was stained darker with the hemorrhage from between her thighs. Her heart raced, her mind trying to make sense of what was happening.
Cold water and blood surrounded her, the shower becoming a death-like cocoon.
I’ve miscarried.
The realization washed over her like the tide, slow but unstoppable in its momentum. She couldn’t take the thought back. She couldn’t put the blood back inside herself. She couldn’t undo whatever had been done. She couldn’t make things alright.
She and Tom had tried.
They had tried to make things alright. They had tried to put back together the pieces of their broken marriage. And this is where they had landed. This was the place it had brought them to.
Her breathing quickened. She could feel herself beginning to panic. She called his name—Tom’s name. She wanted him to come, to take her to the hospital, for them to tell her that it was just spotting. A lot of spotting. But nothing more serious than that. The pain she felt wasn’t a child leaving her body prematurely. It was nothing. Nothing to be concerned about. She would be alright. The child would be alright. And she and Tom would be alright.
But there was a part of her, even then, that knew nothing would ever be alright again.
She thought of sitting on the patio with Tom. She thought of the scent of the tea. How it had seemed to foreign and unfamiliar, but she had accepted it without even thinking. She wondered where it came from. Where he had bought it.
In that moment, she knew.
And she stopped calling his name.
Part Four
THE WAY IT ENDS
IONE
I watch, horrified, as Tom sinks the knife into Birdie’s stomach and an inch of the blade disappears, swallowed by flesh. She screams in pain, a howl worthy of an animal being slaughtered. It’s agony given voice.
My feet move me forward, working on instinct. The fact that Tom has both weapons doesn’t stall me. I lunge toward him without thinking. The knife retracts from her stomach, blood pooling on the edge and running down to the hilt. He looks at me, his eyes wild, an animal’s.
“Tom—” I begin.
“It’s only fitting,” Vanessa interrupts.
Tom quickly shifts his focus from me
