At 3 a.m., my daughter called me, begging for help—her husband was beating her. When I arrived, the doctor pulled a sheet over her face and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” He lied, claiming she’d been mugged on the way home. The police believed him; everyone believed him. Everyone except me. He thought he’d escaped—but my daughter didn’t call just to say goodbye. She called to make sure he would follow her straight into hell.

The hospital waiting room was a study in sterile cruelty. The fluorescent lights hummed with a sound that burrowed into your skull, a low-frequency drone that felt like a migraine waiting to happen. The air smelled of bleach, old coffee, and the unique, metallic tang of panic.

I sat on a hard plastic chair, my posture rigid. My hands were clasped so tightly in my lap that my knuckles had turned the color of bone, the blood squeezed out of them just as the hope was being squeezed out of my chest. Every time the automatic doors slid open, my heart slammed against my ribs, only to falter when it was just another nurse or a janitor pushing a mop bucket.

“Mrs. Vance?”

I looked up. A doctor in blue scrubs stood there. He looked exhausted, his eyes rimmed with red, his surgical mask hanging loosely around his neck like a surrender flag. He didn’t have to say the words. I saw them in the slump of his shoulders, in the way he wouldn’t quite meet my gaze.