In the split second before impact, I realized Thaddeus had anticipated this too. He hadn't left me a single opening.
The walls were already lined with padding.
"In here, I'm the only one who decides when you die."
He climbed through the window and grabbed a fistful of my hair, then slapped me across the face. Once. Twice. Again.
"And right now, it's not time for you to die yet."
He tied me to the bed again. I knew every line of Thaddeus's face better than my own, but the expression he wore was so cold it belonged to a stranger.
"Do you know what true despair is?" he said.
"It's when you see hope drawing close. When you think you can almost reach it." He paused. "And then it shatters all over again."
"Like just now, when you thought you had a chance to escape."
"Thaddeus, I want to know why." I held his gaze. "At least let me die knowing the truth."
"I don't believe you'd kill me just because you stopped loving me."
"You're not that kind of person. I believe you."
Right now, I needed to do everything in my power to save myself, even if that meant groveling.
He lunged forward and seized my throat. "Even now, you still don't understand why?"
"You vicious bitch. Cutting you into a thousand pieces wouldn't be enough."
I looked up at him through my tears. There was a time when my tears alone could undo him. He'd hold me, ask me what was wrong. He would have moved heaven and earth to make me smile.
He once told me he'd make me the happiest woman in the world.
Now my tears meant nothing to him. If anything, they made him angrier.
"You still have the nerve to cry."
Just as the edges of my vision started to go black, Thaddeus released his grip.
"Geraldine was right. Letting you die this easily would be too good for you."
There was a time when anything I said carried weight with him. Now it was Geraldine's words he treated as gospel. If she told him to take my life, he'd do it without blinking.
"Your funeral's already been held. As far as the world is concerned, you're dead. From now on, you'll spend every single day drowning in despair."
Thaddeus left those words hanging in the air and walked out.
Shortly after he left, Geraldine appeared in the hospital room.
She had been my closest friend. We'd known each other since middle school. Same high school, same college, same major. We never ran out of things to talk about.
When I married Thaddeus, she was my maid of honor.