Chapter 3 - The Departure
“We're leaving,” I said, my voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute certainty that left no room for argument.
Ethan took a slow sip of his coffee, his eyes narrowing just a fraction. “Mara, you're overreacting. It's just a few bruises. If we pack up now, we interrupt the whole schedule—”
“I don't give a damn about the schedule, Ethan!” I snapped, scooping Ivy into my arms, ignoring the way she flinched when my hands brushed her shoulders. “Look at her! Look at what's on her skin! We are going home right now, and if you don't want to come with us, I'll walk out of these woods myself.”
For a second—just a fraction of a second—a cold, calculating shadow crossed Ethan's features. It was a look so foreign to the man I thought I knew that my stomach dropped into a bottomless void. But just as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, replaced by a mask of conciliatory compliance.
“Okay,” he said softly, setting his thermos down on a tree stump. “If you're going to panic, we'll go. I just want you to feel safe.”
The drive back was a nightmare wrapped in suffocating silence. Ivy curled up in the backseat, falling back into a heavy, unnatural sleep almost instantly as soon as the car doors slammed shut. Ethan drove with his usual precision, keeping both hands on the wheel at ten and two, his eyes fixed steadily on the winding dirt road ahead.
Every time I glanced back at Ivy in the rearview mirror, my chest tightened. The marks on her arms seemed to darken under the harsh daylight pouring through the car windows. I wanted to check my phone, to see if we had picked up a signal yet, but the little triangle at the top of the screen remained stubbornly empty, crossed out with a silent, mocking X.
“How long until we hit the highway?” I asked, my voice tight.
“About forty minutes,” Ethan replied smoothly without looking at me. “Don't worry, Mara. Once we get back into town, we can take her straight to urgent care just to satisfy your peace of mind.”
My peace of mind. He was framing it as my hysteria, my irrational anxiety. And yet, sitting beside him in the quiet hum of the engine, the truth was beginning to claw its way up from the back of my throat: Ethan wasn't comforting me because he cared; he was managing me.
When we finally reached the outskirts of town, the first cell tower we passed caused my phone to erupt in a frantic chorus of notification chimes. Missed calls, unread texts, emergency alerts. But I ignored them all, leaning forward and tapping the navigation screen until I found the nearest hospital.
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“Turn here,” I ordered, pointing toward the medical center downtown.
Ethan didn't argue. He signaled smoothly, turned the wheel, and pulled into the emergency parking lot with the exact same calm efficiency that had defined every single day of our marriage.
