Slowly, my heart rate settled. I was about to leave when the restroom door slammed open.
"Don't be mad, baby. I promise I'll have that woman gone by tomorrow. Out of this city for good."
Dustin's voice. Low, urgent, threaded with appeasement.
My hand on the stall door went slack.
"If you ever see her again, I will disappear, and you will never find me."
"I swear on my life." His voice dropped to barely a whisper, but it was deadly serious. "You're the only one I love. Have you forgotten what I did to her so you could get pregnant again?"
What did that mean?
What had he done to me? My mind went blank. I wanted to scream, to burst out and grab him and demand the truth.
The last thread of reason kept me rooted in place.
The sound of rustling clothes, fabric tearing, and then Alice's aggrieved whimper melted into soft laughter and a low moan.
"Fine," her voice was liquid, boneless, "I'll believe you one more time."
A pause. Then she spoke again, a note of testing in her tone. "But what if she finds out the truth about her little brat's miscarriage?"
Dustin's voice went cold.
"Don't worry about that. It's been six months. I've already told every doctor to keep their mouths shut. No one would dare tell her."
A chill crawled from the soles of my feet to the crown of my skull.
I stared down at my stomach. Alice's words from before crashed back into me. She had said my miscarriage was no accident.
At the time, I'd dismissed it as another one of her provocations. But what if the truth was far worse?
### Chapter 7
"I still can't believe she was in the dark this whole time," Alice laughed. "You told her the miscarriage happened because she went out in the middle of the night, and she actually bought it."
"That's what she owed you as a mistress," Dustin scoffed. "She'll swallow whatever lie I feed her."
My body could barely hold itself upright, but I forced myself to keep listening.
"Sweetheart, you terminated that little bastard and extracted the fetal stem cells just to repair my womb." Alice's voice dripped with syrupy sweetness. "I'm truly touched. As long as you promise never to go near that tramp again, I'll forgive you."
I clamped my hand over my mouth so hard my fingers nearly tore through my lips.
Thunder cracked through my skull, one bolt after another, shredding everything I thought I knew.