Chapter 7 - False Grief
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For forty-eight agonizing hours, I played the role they needed me to play. I was the tragic victim. Unconscious. Damaged. Empty. A woman with open eyes that tracked nothing, and a voice that did not exist.
The nurses whispered gentle, pitying words when they sponge-bathed me, believing I was lost in the dark. But the real torture was the visitors.
Adrian came every morning. He sat in the chair beside my bed, smelling of stale alcohol and expensive cologne. When the nurses were in the room, he would reach out and hold my limp, cast-encased hand, resting his head against the bedrail to perform the role of the devastated husband. But the absolute second the door clicked shut and we were alone, he would drop my hand like it was diseased. He would pace the room, frantically checking his phone, never once looking at my face.
Cordelia was worse. She came in the afternoons, standing beside him like a marble statue draped in designer silk.
“Poor Lillian,” she would say to the rounding doctors in the hallway, her voice soft with a sickeningly false grief. “She was always so reckless, so stubborn. She never knew how delicate life could be. We are just... heartbroken.”
But when she was alone in the room with me, the mask slipped. She would stand over my bed, inspecting me the way one inspects a pest caught in a trap. She would lean in, her expensive, floral perfume invading my oxygen supply.
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“You really should have stayed in your little world, Lillian,” she whispered one afternoon, her breath hot against my bruised cheek. “Women like you always mistake an invitation for belonging. Now look at you. You’re nothing.”
I didn't blink. I didn't let my breathing hitch. I stared blankly at the ceiling, absorbing her hatred, banking it like coal for a fire she didn't know was coming.
