Page 66 of Coming Home

He stared at me, his mouth tightening into a thin, bloodless line.

"So no," I said, turning my back on him. "I'm not answering that. Who I love isn't your business anymore. You gave that up the day you decided you got to tell me what I was worth."

I took a step toward the exit doors. I was done. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to leave this building and go back to Ralph's house—back to the flawed, stubborn man I loved who was out there in the dark city carrying a terrifying burden all on his own.

James's fingers clamped around my upper arm.

"Emma, wait⁠—"

I yanked away instinctively. He pulled back on reflex, a startled grip stubborn enough to break my momentum. In the clumsy physics of two bodies moving in opposite directions on the wet pool deck, his heel clipped the raised plastic lip of the overflow gutter.

His balance vanished.

I saw it happen in agonizing slow motion. His body tilted backward toward the deep end. On pure survival instinct, his grip on my denim jacket tightened, the frantic, reflexive grab of a falling body. My center of gravity shifted with his, my feet slipped on the damp tile, and together, we tipped over the edge.

The twelve-foot deep end swallowed us both whole.

The cold hit me all at once. Full-body immersion. The water closed over my head, and the shock seized my muscles for one terrifying second.

Then, my arms cut through the water, my legs executed a powerful kick, and I broke the surface in under two seconds. I blinked the burning water from my eyes, treading water as naturally as breathing.

I looked for James.

He was less than a yard away, and it was a horror show. His arms were windmilling wildly, his palms slapping the surface in a frantic frenzy.

His head sank under, bobbed up, and sank again. His eyes were stretched wide with a primal panic that erased the sophisticated man he pretended to be. His mouth opened and closed in desperate gasps, gulping air and water in equal measure.

He couldn't swim.

Three years. I had lived with this man for three entire years, shared his life, and I had never known he couldn't swim. He'd never mentioned it. He'd never suggested a weekend at the beach, never accepted the summer pool invitations from our friends. I had always assumed he just hated the heat or didn't like the mess of the ocean. It had never once occurred to me that he was terrified of it.

For one suspended, breathless moment, I just treaded water and watched him drown.

I watched the man who had dismantled my self-esteem until I could fit inside his palm. I watched the man who had picked apart my wardrobe, my appetite, my friendships, and my identity with surgical, gaslighting patience until there was nothing left of me that he hadn't touched and diminished.

I watched the man who had sat in a warm, dry apartment while I shivered on his porch, confident that I would always break.

He sank again, his hand breaking the surface one last time, fingers clawing uselessly at the humid air. A sound tore out of him, high and raw and wordless.

I could have turned away. I easily could have swum to the aluminum ladder, climbed out of the pool, and dialed 911 from the safety of the dry pavement. Not a soul alive would have blamed me. Nadia wouldn't. Theo wouldn't. Ralph wouldn't. The universe had delivered James to the one exact coordinate where he was helpless and I was infinitely powerful.

Justice, if you believed in that sort of thing, looked exactly like a woman turning her back on her abuser.

But I couldn't do it. My humanity wouldn't let me.

I dove.

With three powerful strokes, my arms sliced through the water with a speed resurrected from another life. I reached him in seconds. My hands gripped his soaking shirt, trying to get a secure hold from behind—exactly the way the old lifeguard manuals taught you.

Approach from the rear, secure under the armpits, keep your torso out of their panicked reach.

I never got the chance.

The instant my fingers brushed his skin, his hands locked onto my shirt, my hair, dragging me toward him like a life vest. He tried to climb my body to reach the air. His dead weight pushed me straight under, his arms locking tight around my neck, his legs thrashing against my ribcage. He didn't know it was me anymore. I was just something solid to stand on, and he drove me down toward the blue concrete floor.

He pushed my head down so he could lift himself an inch higher. Every millimeter of oxygen he gained above the surface was an inch of life I lost below it.

I was trapped underneath him.