Chapter3

The basement was pitch-black.

When the lock clicked into place from the outside, it severed the last sliver of light. I slid down against the wall, pulled my knees to my chest, and buried my face in them, waiting for the agony to pass.

Three minutes went by. Five. Ten.

The pain didn't fade. I coughed twice, a metallic sweetness rising in my throat. I swallowed it back down. It was too dark in here—so dark I didn't even want to see my own blood.

I pushed myself up against the wall, groping blindly in the dark for something to lean on. Two steps forward.

A door. Cold. Iron.

I twisted the handle—unlocked.

Wind howled through the crack, snapping against my face. I shoved it open. Outside lay a narrow path along the side of the estate, leading toward the street corner. A streetlight flickered through the blizzard, casting a sickly yellow glow.

I didn't think twice. I stepped out. I just couldn't stay in that black box. If I had to die, I wanted to die where there was light.

The storm raged harder than before. I wore nothing but a flimsy hospital gown and the coat Ethan had thrown at my face. Ice pellets lashed my skin. I trudged through the snow, the cold gripping my lungs and squeezing tight with every step.

A payphone stood at the corner, its glass panels frosted over with thick ice. I pushed the door open, sliding down against the freezing glass wall. The receiver hung loose on its cord. I reached up, pulled it down, and pressed it to my ear. A dial tone. I dialed a number.

Liam's cell. The only number I remembered.

It rang three times. Then, a connection.

"Hello?" His voice.

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

"Who is this?" Impatience edged into his tone.

"...It's me."

He didn't hang up. That surprised me for a second. Then the background noise bled through—a woman’s laughter, people shouting, "Happy Birthday, Chloe!"

"It's so cold out here," I said.

"What are you doing running outside?" His tone was flat, devoid of a single ripple of emotion. "Ethan said you threw a fit and bolted. I told you, stop playing the victim."

"I'm not pretending." I leaned my head against the glass, watching the heavy snow swallow the city's lights. "...The medicine. The one you took. That was my last dose."

"Chloe is already using it," he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Over the line, Chloe's voice drifted in. "Liam, who is it?"

I heard him say, "Nobody." Then, "Come on, Chloe, darling. Cut the cake."

My mother-in-law Eleanor's voice echoed through the receiver, dripping with sickening sweetness. "That’s the lingering illness from the fire, you must take your medicine and recover properly. If you hadn't rushed into those flames and carried Liam out on your back, our family would have been ruined! You are our savior!"

Immediately following that was the voice of the son I had carried for ten months, the son who had just pushed me out the door. "Happy Birthday, Chloe! You're a million times better than that woman who only knows how to fake being sick! From now on, you're the only mom I recognize!"

"Did you hear that?" Liam's cold, detached voice pressed against the microphone. "This is the person I should be treating well." He didn't pause for even a second. "Even if you freeze to death out there, I won't give you a second glance."

He hung up. A busy signal beeped in my ear.

I held the receiver, listening to the dial tone for a long time. Slowly, I placed it back on the hook.

The snow kept falling. The glass of the phone booth blurred further, turning the streetlights outside into soft, bleeding halos. I lowered my head, my numb fingers sliding across my phone screen. On the display was a document I had downloaded three months ago—an oceanic body donation form. I hadn't thought I'd need it back then. I just felt that, if I died, I wanted to make at least one final decision on my own.

I tapped "Confirm Signature." Fingerprint ID. A line of text popped up on the screen: "I voluntarily donate my body to medical research. Following cremation, my ashes will be scattered into the ocean currents of the Mariana Trench. No headstone. No memorial."

I stared at it for two seconds. It was fine. The trench was thirty-six thousand feet deep, pitch-black, and freezing. It was a place where they could never find me, never dig me up to humiliate me again.

Then I pressed confirm.

The screen faded to black. I leaned back against the glass and tilted my head up.

My trembling right hand reached for the hidden pocket stitched inside the armpit of my hospital gown.

Inside was a tiny wooden sculpture. A model of a dragon. When Ethan was seven, he pointed at a magazine and said he wanted one. I was bedridden with a severe lung infection then, and he just said it casually before running off to play. I remembered it for three whole years. Over the last few months, whenever the nurses weren't looking, I carved it bit by bit with the tip of a broken fruit knife. It wasn't finished yet.

My fingers couldn't hold onto anything anymore. The carving slipped from the pocket and tumbled out the door of the booth, landing in the snow.

Set into the dragon's eyes were two blue glass beads—the gems plucked from my very last pair of earrings.

The laughter from Chloe's birthday party seemed to still echo in my ears. But I could no longer draw in my last breath.

My eyes remained open. The world before me blurred out, little by little.

Inside the grand hall, everyone was still crowding around Chloe, showering her with congratulations.

No one knew that fifty yards away, in a darkened phone booth, someone had just entrusted her ashes to the deepest sea.