Chapter One
Melissa Sanderson watched as the small pool of thick, dark blood spread across the white, tiled floor. She wondered—not for the first time—if she should end it all. If she should end every-thing. She leaned forward on her hands and knees, and began scrubbing at the blood with the damp cloth she found behind the bathroom sink.
She already locked the bathroom door in case he returned— which he often did—so that she could keep him away. Keep him out. The cloth smeared the blood into an arc around her, like an inverted rainbow of red. She tried to ignore the urge to vomit as she wrung the wet cloth over the sink and watched the blood trickle down the drain.
Her stomach tightened as she leaned forward, heaving over the toilet bowl. Nothing came up. Her stomach was empty, since she hadn’t eaten since the night before. She gagged, her stomach lurching and contracting in angry spasms.
There was a sharp knock at the bathroom door, and she wrestled herself slowly to her feet. Unsteady and shaking, she leaned back against the sink and waited.
“Hurry up in there. I need to get ready for work.” His voice was as hard as iron, unmovable. She wanted to open the door and hit him—hurt him—but that idea was laughable. She wasn’t capable of that, no matter what he did to her or how he treated her.
“I’ll be out in five minutes. I’ve just got to get cleaned up.” She heard the footsteps of her husband dissolve down the hall-
way and back into their bedroom. How has it come to this? she asked herself. She turned around, stared into the large mirror on the wall beside her, and she recoiled at the face staring back at her from inside the glass world. It was barely recognizable. Her bottom lip was bruised, swollen, and split from where he had just hit her. A thick line of congealed blood clung to the bottom of her mouth, drying and clotting. She knew he was getting out of con-trol. Her eyes scanned the face in front of her. He was never this bad, and she realized he would normally only hurt her in places that she could hide beneath clothes. This, however, was an ugly masterpiece he created for the world to see. What would she say to her friends and co-workers?
She dabbed at the cut on her lips and winced in pain. It stung badly.
Her hair—long, wavy, and dark—hung limply around her face, clinging to her damp skin. It was the eyes that worried her, though. Her eyes. They looked dead, lifeless, and hopeless. Brown pools of nothingness that looked empty and drained. The plug having been pulled long ago.
She looked at the floor and knew he’d be back in a moment. She had to clean up. Melissa snapped out of her internal fear and confusion and quickly wiped the cloth over the last remaining drops of blood on the floor. So much blood from just one cut, she thought. She wiped over the sink and then turned on the cold tap. Leaning over the sink, she splashed cold water onto her face. “Damn it!” Her face contorted as the cut on her face met the cold liquid, and she took a deep breath. She reached for a towel and pressed it to her face.
Turning back to the mirror, she saw that the swelling had gone down slightly, but her lip was still throbbing, wide with blood beneath the surface.
Footsteps. Another knock. “I need to get in there, Melissa.” He sounded calmer now, like the old Mark Sanderson. The one she had married. The one she used to know. The person he had been for the five years of their relationship. She threw the red, bloodied cloth back behind the sink and stepped quietly over to the bath-room door. She unlocked it slowly and pulled it open.
Mark was standing there, wrapped in his bathrobe—the one she had bought him for his birthday—a towel in his hand and a shaving razor in the other. He smiled weakly as she stepped out-side, passing him. “I won’t be long. We can have breakfast together before work.”
Melissa nodded and headed to the bedroom. She wanted to get dressed.
“Make mine eggs on toast,” he called behind her, his voice full of life and enthusiasm. It was as if the morning that had just happened never did.
