Chapter 1 - The Weight on Her Stomach
The fifty-pound flour bag hit Megan Carter low and hard.
It knocked the air out of her before the pain even registered. The bag burst where it struck the tile, sending a white cloud up around her knees and the wire pantry shelves. She folded over on instinct, both arms wrapping her stomach, her cheek pressed against cold ceramic that smelled faintly of bleach and onion powder.
“Feel the weight of your failure, you useless wife,” Sarah Monroe said.
Sarah stood over her in a navy T-shirt and leggings, breathing hard like she had been waiting all day to do it. She was thirty-four, black hair twisted into a bun, one hand still on the torn bag, the other reaching down for Megan’s hair.
Megan jerked away, but Sarah caught a fistful anyway and dragged her halfway upright. Pain shot across Megan’s scalp. Somewhere beyond the pantry, a cabinet door banged, and Megan caught sight of a pair of little white sneakers near the kitchen threshold.
“Hannah,” she rasped. “Please. Not in front of Hannah.”
Brian filled the doorway and did nothing.
He stood there in his plaid work shirt from Carter Comfort Solutions, one shoulder against the frame, jaw tight but calm in a way that chilled her more than Sarah’s grip. “Stay down and sign,” he said. “Or she’ll keep teaching you your place.”
Megan looked at the papers on the bottom shelf, held in place by a can of tomatoes and a roll of wax paper. She had seen the title before: petition for emergency disbursement. Hannah’s trust. The money from the pickup-line crash three years earlier. The money Megan had promised their daughter nobody would touch unless it was truly for Hannah.
“No.”
Sarah shoved her flat again and drove the flour bag into Megan’s abdomen with both hands. Megan clawed at the tile and tasted metal in her mouth.
“Then learn to suffer quietly,” Sarah said, leaning down so close Megan could smell spearmint gum, “while your husband chooses me.”
May you like
The pantry door flew wider. Robert Ellis stopped on the threshold, his face turning the color of old brick as he took in his daughter on the floor, Sarah over her, Brian in the doorway, flour settling over everything like ash.
“What in God’s name,” he said, voice low and deadly, “is she supposed to sign?”
