Nothing.
Again.
Again.
The metal burned with cold against my skin. My palms slipped. My breath came too fast. I slammed my shoulder against the door, then both hands, then my fists. The sound of the pounding bounced back at me from all sides, made smaller by the room, swallowed before it could travel anywhere useful.
“Derek!”
The name cracked out of me like something torn.
I hit the door again.
“Derek, open this! Open the door!”
Then I heard his voice.
It came from above me, thin and flattened through a speaker, and that somehow made it worse. If he had been outside the door, if I could have imagined him standing there with his hand still near the lock, maybe I could have still believed there was some path back into humanity, some trace of panic in him, some chance this had gone farther than he intended.
But his voice came through the intercom calm and level and already distant, as if he had planned not only what he would do, but the exact emotional temperature at which he would do it.
“I’m sorry, Grace…”
That sentence hurt more than the door.
I had never understood until then how apology can become a form of violence. A scream would have been easier. Rage would have been easier. Even silence might have been easier. But “I’m sorry” suggested order. Decision. Completion. It told me he was not improvising. He was not confused. He was not about to change his mind.
My hand stayed on the metal handle.
“Let me out,” I said. Then louder, because the first version sounded too small even to me. “Please. The babies. Derek, please.”
For a second I thought maybe I had reached him. Not because I heard anything in his breathing. I couldn’t. But because surely that word still meant something. Babies. Not a concept. Not a future plan. Not a maybe. Our babies. Real and inside me and alive.
Then he answered.
“The insurance pays triple for accidental death.”
I remember the way the sentence arrived in pieces, as if my mind refused to assemble it all at once. Insurance. Triple. Accidental death. It was language from paperwork, from commercials, from conversations people have across kitchen tables when they are planning the boring adult future. Language about categories. About percentages. About profit.
Not language that belonged inside a freezer where a husband had locked his wife.
I think I stopped breathing for a second.
“No,” I whispered.
The word didn’t mean anything yet. It was too small for what was happening. It was just the first useless shape my mouth could make.
Then I found another.
“You planned this.”
His answer came almost immediately.
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