My husband buried me up to my neck while I was pregnant—then slapped me for spitting in his face, never realizing what I had already set in motion.

Grant was already packing the last fistful of dirt around my neck when the contraction started.

I felt it tighten across my lower back, then pull hard beneath my eight-month belly, which was buried beneath loose Ohio clay. I tried to lift my shoulders, but the soil pressed against my ribs.

“Stay there and learn what disobedient wives deserve,” Grant said.

His knees were muddy. His navy T-shirt clung to his back in the August heat. The shovel lay beside him, close enough for me to see but impossible to reach.

I coughed dirt from my lips. “Get me out.”

“You’ll come out when you sign.”

He pushed both hands against the soil around my shoulders, packing it tighter.

The pit had started as a drainage trench behind our house in Westerville. Grant’s family landscaping company had dug it three weeks earlier, then abandoned the job when a supplier stopped delivering materials.

Now my husband had turned it into a prison.

His mother, Teresa, watched from the patio beneath a striped umbrella. She had poured cold hose water over my face twice that morning and shaken a plastic container of beetles into the dirt near my shoulders when I refused to repeat the words she wanted.

I authorize the home-equity loan.

I release the funds to Mercer Outdoor Services.

I had refused every time.

Grant leaned over me. “You’re nothing but a filthy burden carrying my child.”

I jerked forward and spat into his face.

He recoiled, wiping his cheek.

“You pathetic coward,” I said. “Burying a pregnant woman won’t make you a man.”

His hand struck my mouth. My head snapped sideways, breaking the crust of mud beneath my jaw.

When I turned back, I tasted blood.

“You will pay a very high price for what you did to me today.”

Grant raised his hand again.

Teresa stopped him.