Three Years of Small Cuts
Chapter 05 - Three Years of Small Cuts
Ava didn't sleep that night. She lay awake replaying three years of marriage the way you replay a movie once someone tells you the twist ending, every scene suddenly meaning something different.
Downstairs, she could hear low voices, her father and Marcus, still working through the night, phones buzzing, printers running somewhere in the study that used to be Julian's office and would, she suspected, never quite belong to him again after tonight.
The first year had been good. Or she'd thought it was good, back when Julian's attention felt like devotion instead of the beginning of something considerably more controlling.
She remembered their wedding day clearly, the way he'd cried during his vows, the way everyone at the reception had told her how lucky she was, how attentive he seemed, how he never once let her carry her own drink across a crowded room.
She hadn't understood yet that attentiveness could be its own kind of leash.
He'd started small. Little comments about her friends, questions about why she needed to see them so often. A raised eyebrow when she wanted to take a job offer at her father's foundation instead of staying home to "focus on us."
She'd given up the job. She remembered telling herself it was her own choice, not something he'd pressured her into, even though she still couldn't quite explain why she'd cried in the car afterward.
Year two brought the first real fight, the first time his voice had gone cold and sharp enough to frighten her, though he'd apologized so completely afterward, with flowers and tears of his own, that she'd convinced herself it was a single bad night rather than a pattern forming.
It hadn't been a single bad night. She understood that now, lying in the dark with her hands on her belly, feeling the baby shift beneath her palms.
By year three, the comments had turned into control disguised as concern. Where are you going. Who are you talking to. Why does your phone need a passcode if you have nothing to hide.
She remembered the specific night he'd read through every text on her phone while she slept, and how, in the morning, he'd twisted it into something she'd apologized for, as though her privacy had been the actual violation instead of his.
She'd stopped seeing her college roommate entirely, not because Julian forbade it outright, but because every visit afterward cost her three days of cold silence and pointed questions she didn't have the energy to keep answering.
Her friends had slowly stopped calling. She understood now, lying awake in the dark, that she'd let an entire support system erode one small, exhausted surrender at a time, never once noticing the pattern until there was almost nobody left to notice it for her.
The pregnancy had made it worse, not better. She'd expected tenderness. Instead she'd gotten a man who monitored her doctor's appointments, who questioned every symptom like she might be lying about something, who grew colder as her due date approached instead of warmer.
She thought about the divorce papers in her desk, the appointment with Grace Millbrook she'd scheduled in secret, telling Julian she was meeting a friend for lunch instead.
*He found them. He went through my things while I was getting my blood pressure checked, and he found the one piece of paper that proved I was finally trying to leave.*
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from an unknown number, sent at two in the morning.
*You don't know what your father actually did to get where he is. Ask him about Preston Okafor. Ask him what happened to the man who built this company with him before he disappeared.*
Ava sat up straight, heart pounding, staring at a name she'd never once heard in her entire life.
May you like
She read the message three more times, trying to make sense of it, trying to decide whether this was Julian reaching out through some anonymous channel, or something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with her marriage at all.
Her thumb hovered over the reply button for a long moment before she set the phone down instead, deciding this was a conversation that needed to happen in daylight, with her father sitting across from her, unable to look away.
