Every day he not only beat me but also poured boiling water on me, roaring, "I'll boil your belly until a son comes out!"

I collapsed, my skin scorched, unconscious.

At the hospital, he lied, saying I was burned in an accident.

The doctor showed him the X-ray, his voice cold as death itself: "She suffered third-degree burns to her internal organs, and... we discovered she was never actually infertile. All the previous times, she was pregnant with sons... but you killed them before they were born."

The fluorescent light flattened every shadow in the room, leaving nowhere for Luke to hide his face. His fingers tightened around the bed rail while the monitor beside me kept its steady pulse. The doctor did not lower the X-ray. She turned from him to me, watching for the smallest sign that I could hear.

Luke stepped closer and spoke before I could move.

"She gets confused when she's in pain. She knocked the pot over herself."

The doctor asked him to step back. Then she said my name.

"Caroline, can you understand me?"

Opening my eyes felt like lifting something heavier than my whole body. My throat burned, and every breath pulled against the dressings around my chest and arms. Still, I looked past Luke and found the doctor's face.

She asked one question.

"Was this an accident?"

Luke's hand slid over mine, not gently. His thumb pressed into my knuckles as if pain could finish the lie for him.

I pulled my hand away.

"No."

The word barely carried across the room, but it changed who was allowed to speak.

Luke laughed once and said I had always been dramatic. He told the doctor I had been obsessed with getting pregnant and had become unstable after every loss. He used the same calm voice he used at family dinners, the voice that made cruelty sound like concern.

The doctor glanced at the X-ray, then at the notes already entered when he brought me in.

"What happened?" she asked me.

I could hear Luke breathing beside the bed. I remembered all the mornings he had told me I was broken. All the times he blamed my body, my food, my stress, my supposed failure to give him a son. He had repeated it until I stopped asking why every pregnancy ended after one of his rages.

"He poured it on me," I said.

Luke's chair scraped backward.

He told the doctor I was lying to punish him. He said I had slipped near the stove. He said he was the one who carried me to the car, as if driving me to the hospital erased what happened before the engine started.

The nurse moved between him and the bed when he reached for me again. She did not argue with him. She simply blocked his hand and asked him to stand near the door.

I watched Luke realize that the room no longer belonged to his version of the story.

He tried another threat.

"You don't have money," he said quietly. "You don't have anywhere else to go."

For years, that sentence had worked better than his fists. He controlled the bank account, answered my phone, and told people I was too sick to visit. When my older sister kept calling, he changed my number and said she had stopped caring.

The doctor asked whether there was anyone I trusted.

Luke answered for me.

"No."