The cold hospital tiles pressed against my cheek, and I could taste copper in my mouth, the distinct, metallic tang of blood mixing with the sharp antiseptic smell that hospitals never seem to scrub away. My surgical incision, a fresh angry line across my abdomen, screamed in protest as I tried to push myself up. I could hear the squeak of the nurse’s rubber-soled shoes rushing across the linoleum toward me, a frantic rhythm of emergency.
Three days. I had been out of emergency appendectomy surgery for exactly three days when my stepfather decided I was faking my weakness.
I’m Rihanna Hester, twenty-nine years old. Until that moment on the hospital floor, watching a dust bunny drift under the bed while my lip swelled, I thought I knew what rock bottom looked like. It turns out, I lacked imagination.
The nightmare began when Gary, my stepfather of three years, stormed into my recovery room that morning. I had just undergone emergency surgery—the kind where the surgeon tells you afterward, with a grave face, that you were about two hours away from a burst appendix and sepsis. “Lucky,” the doctor had called me. That word would come back to haunt me in ways I never expected.
