The pillow came down like a white curtain over my face, soft as mercy and heavy as murder.
Through the tightly woven cotton pressing over my nose and mouth, I could smell the harsh, sterile tang of hospital detergent violently clashing with the cloying, expensive scent of Chanel No. 5. It was her signature scent. I had spent the last two years suffocating under it at country club dinners and holiday galas, but tonight, the suffocation was literal.
Above me, my mother-in-law, Margaret Sterling, smiled as she tried to end my life.
“You should have died in the fall, you cheap trash,” Margaret whispered.
She leaned her weight into her arms. The cold, heavy platinum of her diamond tennis bracelet scraped viciously against my bruised cheek. The metal was freezing against my inflamed skin, a sharp contrast to the burning heat building in my oxygen-starved lungs.
“But I’ll finish the job,” she continued, her voice a low, melodic purr that vibrated through the mattress, “so my son can finally be free of you.”
I could not thrash. I could not fight back. My body lay locked in a rigid cage of medical plaster from my collarbones down to my ankles. A full-body cast. Two cracked ribs that screamed with every shallow intake of air. Three fractured vertebrae that threatened paralysis if I shifted wrong. One highly suspicious, near-fatal plunge from the third-story balcony of my own home.
The doctors had called it a miracle. The nurses said I was the luckiest woman in the trauma ward.
Margaret just thought I was stubborn. A weed in her manicured English garden that refused to die.
My lungs began to burn, a deep, caustic ache radiating through my chest. My pulse hammered frantically against the thick plaster cast, feeling like a trapped bird battering its wings against a concrete wall. The human instinct when deprived of oxygen is to panic, to thrash, to claw at the obstruction.
