He stands up out of the chair slow, almost lazy, and there's nothing careful about him anymore, none of the performance he used to put on for anyone who might be watching. No concern in his voice. No coy little smile that pretends to be affection. Just a man who has finally stopped pretending, in the one house where pretending was never required.
I go for the door.
He's already between me and it.
He's bigger than I remember. Or maybe I've just spent years shrinking him down in my memory so he'd be small enough to survive thinking about. Either way he fills the doorway now, filling the only way out of the house that raised me, and my whole body understands before my mind catches up that there is nowhere in this room to go.
Seven years of moving through the world half braced for this exact moment, and somehow I still didn't picture it right. I always imagined I'd see him coming. A car on the street, a shadow at a window, something.
Instead he was just already here, sitting in my mother's chair, waiting on a morning he had no way of predicting and every reason to expect eventually.
That's the part that scares me worst. He didn't need to know when. He only had to know I'd come back here someday, and he was patient enough to wait me out.
The gun clears his jacket before I can even think about running.
He does it with the same flat competence he's carried a badge with his whole career, no drama, no shake in his hand, just a man doing a thing he's done, or trained to do, a hundred times before. He levels it at me like he's pointing at a chair he wants me to sit in.
"Sit down, Lyddie."
I don't sit. My legs won't do it. But I stop moving, because there's a gun between us now and every cell in my body has gone very, very still.
He's talking, something about how good it feels, how long he's waited, how satisfying it is finally, and I'm not really hearing the words. I'm watching his eyes, and his eyes have gone somewhere else, somewhere pleased with himself, somewhere so busy enjoying this that they've stopped watching my hands.
My phone is still in my back pocket.
I don't decide to do it so much as my thumb decides for me. I slide it half out, enough to hit the button on the side, enough to wake the screen without looking down at it, and I find the recorder app by feel alone, months of muscle memory from a marriage full of things worth documenting. I press it and shove the phone back down into my waistband where the fabric of my shirt covers it, and I don't breathe until it's done.
He never looks down once.
"You've got nothing to say?" he says. "After everything I did for you?"
The test is still in my other hand.
He sees it a half second after I remember I'm holding it. I try to close my fingers around it, too late. It slips, or he knocks it. I'm not even sure which. It clatters onto the hardwood between us, rolls once, and stops with the little window facing up.
Two lines.
For one whole second neither of us says anything.
Then his face changes.
I have never once, in the entire time I've known this man, seen him look anything but pleased with himself, some flavor of smug or cruel. Not now. Now there's something raw underneath it, something that looks almost like rage, and it takes me a second to understand: it's fury that this exists at all, not fury on my behalf.
"He knocked you up," he says, and his voice has gone flat and ugly. "Little prince gets his heir. That's rich."
"Frank."
"No, that's..." He laughs, short and humorless. "That's just perfect. That's just one more thing of his I get to hold now, isn't it? One more thing that belongs to me, same as you do."
"It doesn't belong to anyone," I say, and my voice shakes on every word.
"Everything belongs to somebody, Lyddie. You learned that lesson young. Guess your kid's gonna learn it younger."
He crosses the room while he says it, gun never wavering, and takes my wrists in one hand hard enough to bruise, and there's a length of cord already looped through his belt like he packed for this, like he knew exactly how this morning would go before I did.
"You don't get to decide what happens to it," he says, working the knot. "Same as you never got to decide what happened to you."
I don't fight him. I can't, not with the barrel a foot from my face, not with something growing inside me that I can't protect if I'm dead. I just stand there and let him bind my hands and hate every second of my own stillness.
