Chapter 6
Evelyn POV
I reached for my own wrist first.
My fingers passed through the skin without resistance — no warmth, no pulse, no give of flesh.
I pulled my hand back and stood there looking at what was left of me on the bed.
The room was still dark. Bryce hadn't moved from the foot of the mattress.
I didn't accept it. I couldn't. I pressed my palm to the shoulder of the woman on the bed, trying to push myself back in, trying to find some seam or opening where I could force my way through.
My hand passed through cotton and skin and bone as though none of it was there. I tried the other shoulder.
I tried pressing both hands flat against the center of her chest, leaning my weight into it, and felt nothing — no resistance, no surface, nothing to push against.
"Wake up," I said. My voice sounded wrong, too clear, too close, like it was coming from inside my own skull with nowhere to travel.
"Wake up. Wake up, please, you have to wake up."
She didn't move.
I turned toward the door and screamed. I heard every syllable of it land perfectly inside my own head and go absolutely nowhere. No one in that hallway heard a single sound.
Then Bryce moved. He crossed to the bed rail, located the call button in the dark, and pressed it. Once, then again. He stepped back, ran one hand through his hair.
When the door opened thirty seconds later and the light from the hallway cut across the room, he was standing with his shoulders dropped and his head bowed, already performing the shape of a man who had just found his wife.
Two nurses came in first, then a third person behind them whose footsteps were faster and heavier.
I moved to the side of the bed and put myself between them and the body — between them and me — and held out both hands and said, very clearly, "She was strangled. He strangled her. Her throat. Please look at her throat."
The first nurse walked directly through me.
No collision, no cold, no sensation of any kind. She simply moved through the space where I was standing and leaned over the bed.
I turned and watched her reach for the wrist I had already tried to hold, and I said it again: "Her throat. Please. Look at the marks on her throat."
No one looked up.
I grabbed for the nurse's arm. My fingers closed on nothing.
I tried again, deliberately, slowly, focusing on the fabric of her sleeve, and my hand passed through it the way it had passed through the sheet and the shoulder and the wrist and every other surface I had tried to touch since I found myself standing here.
The team worked for several minutes.
I stood at the head of the bed and watched their hands — a flashlight across her pupils, two fingers at her wrist, a brief exchange I couldn't fully catch.
Then the movements slowed. Then stopped. Someone pulled the sheet up over her face, and the room went very quiet.
I looked at the shape under the sheet and stopped trying to find a way back in. It was finished. Whatever I was now, this was it.
The medical staff left one by one. Bryce stayed.
When the last person stepped out, Bryce straightened. He exhaled once — slow, deliberate — and I watched his shoulders settle back into their natural line.
I had felt his hands on my throat twenty minutes ago. Now he was standing in the same room, breathing like a man who had just finished a difficult but necessary task.
The thing that moved through me wasn't grief anymore. It was colder than that, and much more useful.
He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, and Sophia was already there.
She was standing a few feet from the door with her arms crossed low over her stomach and her weight on one hip.
She looked up the moment he appeared. "Did she say anything?" Her voice was quiet, controlled. "Before — did she tell anyone what happened in the stairwell?"
"She can't tell anyone anything now." Bryce didn't look at her directly. He kept his voice below the level that would carry. "It's done."
Sophia's shoulders dropped a half inch. Then she said, "What do we say?"
He was quiet for a moment, not hesitating — thinking, organizing. "She came to the office and found us. She lost control. She hit you."
He glanced at the mark on Sophia's cheek. "That stays. She shoved you first. I tried to get between you; she went into the stairwell. She was hysterical. She lost her footing. She fell."
"And after?"
"She knew the baby was gone when they told her at the hospital. She didn't want to — she couldn't cope with it. That's what they'll understand. A woman that far along, losing a pregnancy, losing everything." He said it cleanly, each piece fitting against the next. "No one is going to push back on that."
Sophia was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded once and said nothing else.
I stood two feet away and listened to every word. The sequence he'd chosen, the language he'd picked, the way he'd turned Sophia's bruised cheek into the centerpiece of the whole story.
Three years I had spent trusting this man. And now he was building the explanation for my murder in a hospital hallway.
I couldn't make a sound, and I couldn't touch a thing.
So I listened. I memorized. That was all I had left, and I wasn't going to waste it.
His phone buzzed first, and then mine rang.
My phone was in his jacket pocket — he had taken it from the room at some point, and I hadn't registered the moment it happened.
He pulled it out now and looked at the screen, and I crossed the distance between us in two steps and looked with him.
My father's name on the screen, and his contact photo — the one I'd taken of him at the kitchen table last Thanksgiving, slightly blurred because he'd turned his head at the last second — and the phone ringing in Bryce's hand with no one answering it.
I reached for it. My hand passed through the phone, through the back of Bryce's hand, through the screen still lit with my father's name.
I tried again. I pressed both palms flat against the phone and pushed, and nothing happened, and the call rang out and went to voicemail.
Bryce waited a moment, then opened a text window. He typed with one thumb, unhurried: [Checkup ran long, and they want to keep me for observation tonight. I'm exhausted. I'll call when I can. Don't worry.]
He hit send.
Eleven seconds later, my father replied: [Rest well. Call me when you're up.]
I read those words, and I couldn't breathe.
My father was sitting somewhere in the East Side house, at the kitchen table or in his chair by the window, and he had just read a message he believed I had sent him, and he was going to wait for a phone call that was never going to come.
He did not know. He had no idea. He was going to go to sleep tonight without knowing his daughter was dead.
Bryce locked the screen and put the phone back in his pocket.
I sank until I was crouching on the hallway floor with my hands over my face, and I stayed there for a moment, because there was nothing else I could do right now except feel the full weight of it before I decided what came next.
Then I stood up.
Bryce was already walking toward the elevator at the end of the hallway. Sophia had fallen into step a few feet behind him.
I had no voice. I had no hands. I had no way to reach my father or flag down a nurse or stop a single thing that was already in motion.
But I could follow him. I could listen. I could hold every word he said against the inside of my memory and not let go of a single one.
I walked through the closed door of the ward without slowing down, and I kept moving.
