Chapter 33

THEN:

Angela stormed into the bedroom, her heart pounding against her ribcage. Will followed her.

"Angela, I… I…."

"How could you do this to me? I… I gave you children. We were a family. You told me I was crazy, but you were having an affair all along. How could you do this to me? To your wife?"

Her voice broke, a tremor betraying the storm of emotions within as she faced Will across the room. The question hung heavy in the air, laced with betrayal. "And with my own mother?"

Will froze beside the bed, his face contorting as if he'd bitten into a bitter fruit. "Angela, I—" Guilt flashed across his features, quickly masked by a hardening jawline. "You've got it all wrong," he said, his voice climbing with each word. "It's not what you think. You're seeing things again. It's wrong, Angela."

"Wrong?" Angela's hands shook at her sides, fingers curling into fists. Her blue eyes, usually reservoirs of warmth, now sparked with thehurt that seared through her composure. "Don't lie to me!"

"Believe what you want!" Will's attempt at a rebuttal came out strangled, caught between self-defense and the truth he couldn't seem to face. His stance widened as though bracing against an invisible force.

She stepped closer, the space between them electric with tension. "I deserve the truth."

"Truth?" Will spat out the word, a sneer creeping onto his lips. "You think you're so perfect, don't you? Always the martyr."

Her retort was sharp, a blade unsheathed. "I am your wife!"

"Sometimes, I wonder!"

Will's words cut through the air, jagged and raw. Each syllable dripped with a venom that seemed foreign coming from him.

"Is that how little we mean to you?" Angela's voice crescendoed, filling the room with the sound of a heart fracturing. She searched his face for the man she married but found only a stranger wearing Will's skin. "Me and the children?"

His stance shifted, a mixture of defiance and desperation. "It's always all about you. You never see it, do you? How you push people away."

"By loving them?" Her whisper was a wail wrapped in disbelief.

"By smothering them!" Will countered, his palms upturned as if presenting an obvious fact Angela had missed.

"Love is not suffocation," she said, steadying her voice with effort.

"Isn't it?" He raised an eyebrow, challenging her belief, her vision of their life together.

"Love is trust, Will." Angela's gaze didn't waver, even as her world did, crumbling around her. "Something you've just destroyed."

He exhaled and shook his head. Will's jaw clenched, his eyes darting away from her piercing blue gaze. "You wouldn't understand," he muttered, a thread of escape in his voice.

"Make me understand!" The plea was sharp, her insistence a tangible force in the room.

"Stop it, Angela!" He flung the words at her like stones.

"Stop what? Caring?" Her arms spread wide, a gesture of her bewildered heart.

"Twisting everything." Will's hands balled into fists at his sides.

"Nothing is twisted about betrayal!" She stepped forward, her spirit unyielding.

"Isn't there?" His laugh was hollow, cold as the void between them.

"Tell me why!" Angela reached for him, seeking something to hold onto in the chasm that had opened beneath her feet. "Why her of all the women in the world?"

"Enough!" Will's shout splintered the air. He lunged, his movements sudden and violent.

Angela recoiled but not fast enough. His fingers wrapped around her arm, vise-like, unforgiving. Her skin burned beneath his grasp.

"Let go," she gasped, the words barely escaping her constricted throat.

"Angela…." His breath was hot against her face, his grip unrelenting.

Panic surged through Angela's veins, primal and fierce. She twisted against the iron clamp of Will's fingers.

"Get off me!" Her cry was a shard of glass in the thick air, her breaths coming quick and ragged.

Will's hold didn't slacken, his eyes a tempest of emotions she could no longer read. She pushed against his chest, her muscles coiled with urgency. Every fiber in Angela's being screamed to be free, to escape the suffocating grip that threatened to snuff out her light.

"Angela, you're not listening—" His words splintered as she cut him off.

"Neither are you!" Her voice was a whip-crack, splitting the tension.

She shoved harder, the force of her push fueled by betrayal, fear, and the need to protect herself from the man she no longer recognized. Their dance was desperation and denial, a macabre ballet in the half-light of their bedroom where shadows clung to the walls like silent witnesses.

"Stop," he growled, but Angela heard only the call of survival.

"Never." The word was a bullet, fired with all the strength she had left.

Their bodies collided and recoiled, a violent rhythm that matched the pounding of Angela's heart. Every shoveand twist echoed the love that had once bound them, now frayed and snapping like an overstressed rope.

"Let go," she panted, her will an unyielding force as she struggled to break the bonds of his faltering resolve.

Will's face contorted, a grotesque mask of fury twisting his features. His hands, once tender in their touch, were now weapons fueled by a dark desire he could not name. His breaths came ragged; each inhale was a battle, each exhale a storm.

"How long?" Angela spat. "How long has this been going on?"

She looked at her mother, who shook her head. "Weeks? Months?"

Her mom shook her head again.

"Y-years?"

"It started at the engagement party," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

Angela felt her heart drop. This couldn't be true. They had betrayed her for years? For her entire marriage? She had been right all along? They had both told her she was crazy—that she was making things up. But she had been right all along?

"I need to be alone. Please leave me alone," she said, addressing the two of them. "Diane? I want you to leave, and I never want to see you again."

Her mother nodded, then gathered her things and left. Will followed her out and closed the door behind them.

Angela was alone now, sitting on the bed staring at her hands, not knowing what to do next. She sat like that for hours, hearing the kids come home from school, hearing their dad make them dinner, and later put them to bed. Angela didn't move. She just sat there, listening to the sounds of life moving on.

At eleven p.m., Will came to the bedroom and turned on the lights.

"Are you just going to sit there?" he asked. "You don't even care that your children missed you? I told them you were sick and to leave you alone. I fed them and put them to bed all by myself."

"You want me to thank you for that? Give you a medal?" she hissed.

"Well, it wasn't a lie. You are really sick if you think anything was going on between your mother and me."

"You're telling me that what I saw wasn't real? That I'm making it up?" she asked, rising to her feet.

"Enough!" The word erupted from Will, guttural, edged with venom. "Just get out of here if that's what you want."

She nodded. "I think that is exactly what I want."

Without another word, Angela walked to the door and into the dark hallway. Will sprang after her, grabbed her shoulder as she reached the top of the staircase, and made her turn around.

"You're sick, do you know that?" he spat. "That's what I'll tell everyone. Who will they believe, huh? The well-esteemed pediatrician whom everyone in the community knows and loves? Or the crazy lady who attacks neighbors and her own husband at dinner parties? I have a pretty good guess which way they'll lean."

"You slept with my mother," she said, then laughed. It came off as manic, crazy even. "You sick, sick pervert."

Angela, her heart a thunderous drumbeat in her chest, felt the world tilt as Will's shove sent her spiraling into chaos. Time fractured into a series of snapshots: his hand releasing her arm, the sudden absence of his weight, the rush of cold air where warmth had been.

Her body, graceful even in panic, betrayed her. Limbs flailed, seeking purchase in the nothingness that greeted her. Fabric whispered against skin, a cruel imitation of intimacy as her clothes billowed around her in an unforgiving dance.

The staircase loomed, an unyielding specter. Gravity, merciless in its decree, pulled her down. She reached out, fingers grabbing for the banister, a lifeline just beyond her grasp. But then a second shove made her hand slip, and that was the end of it. The abyss claimed her, and soon, the darkness as she hit the bottom of the stairs.

Impact. Wood met flesh with a brutal kiss, the sound reverberating through the hollow spaces of the house. Pain bloomed, a cruel garden growing wild and unchecked.

But Angela Jennings, whose compassion painted her world in hues of love, lay still at the foot of the stairs, silence her only response.

The silence struck Will harder than any scream. His breath hitched, his eyes stretching wide as the truth crashed into him with more force than Angela's body had met the staircase moments before. Horror etched deep grooves in his face, a grotesque sculpture of regret.

"Angela?" The name, usually a tender murmur from his lips, was now a shard of glass in his throat.

Motionless, she lay. A crumpled form at odds with the vibrant woman who breathed life into every room she entered. Blonde hair fanned out, an eerie contrast to the dark wood beneath her. Angela's chest rose and fell with the faintest quiver, each shallow breath a whisper of the pain radiating through her, her fingers digging their nails into the wooden floors below.

"Angela!" His voice broke, splintering the stillness. No soft, soothing tone answered—no firm resolve to steady the spinning world.

Will stumbled forward, knees weak, the distance between them an abyss he had created. His hands trembled with dread. He ran down the stairs.

"Please," he begged to the quiet. "Please. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

But Angela, the heart of their home, remained silent, her bright blue eyes staring at him, blood running from the back of her head where she had collided with the large vase at the base of the stairs. Her strength, so often a quiet undercurrent, had been consumed by the violence of the fall.

"Angela, I…."

Words failed, guilt choking him, turning his plea into a strangled gasp.

The house, their sanctuary, stood witness to the tragedy, its walls closing in, suffocating. In the wake of his actions, Will found himself alone, unable to actor know what to do next.

And then there was something else. Panic.

It clawed at Will's insides, a feral thing desperate to escape. Her stillness screamed louder than any cry for help. His gaze darted over Angela's form, the angle of her limbs unnatural, chilling. Blood—a dark red against the soft hue of her blouse—began to bloom.

He should call for help, should be pressing his hands to wounds, should be doing something other than staying there, drowning in the rising tide of his own fear. But the phone felt a universe away, and his body refused to obey. He was a doctor. He knew what to do.

Yet he didn't.

Instead, Will backed away. Each step was a betrayal, his heel a gavel condemning him. The staircase loomed above, an escape route, a coward's path.

"Forgive me," he choked out, the words empty, futile.

He pivoted, the motion jarring, and took the stairs two at a time. His breath came in sharp bursts, punctuating the silence that had devoured any trace of the life they had built.

The bedroom door slammed shut behind him, the sound a punctuation mark to the end of Angela's quiet strength and their shared dreams. Alone now, with only his racing heartbeat for company, Will leaned against the cool wood, gasping for air, for absolution, for anything but the truth of what lay below.

Her absence was a void, pulling him toward an edge he could never return from.