“She hit me, Caleb.”

Her voice is a pathetic whimper. Amelia—his best friend since childhood, the woman now carrying his child—clutches her stomach, her face wet. Not with tears, you notice. With the water she’d just thrown in your face.

Before you can even wipe the cold droplets from your eyes, he’s there. Caleb. Your husband. His presence fills the sterile hospital hallway, all righteous fury and misplaced protection. He doesn’t look at you, not really. He sees a monster. He sees his pregnant friend, seemingly cornered and weeping.

“You didn’t see what happened” you start, your voice dangerously calm.

But he’s not listening. He never was. His world has already narrowed to Amelia and the baby she claims is his. A drunken one-night mistake, they’d called it. A mistake that was currently tearing your life apart.

“Caleb, she—”

Crack.

The sound echoes, sharp and ugly. The sting blooms across your cheek, hot and immediate. His hand. He’d struck you.

“How low can you go?” he hisses, his face twisted in disgust. “You hit the woman carrying my child?”

Something inside you snaps. A laugh bubbles up, ugly and raw, tearing from your throat. It keeps coming, a hysterical, broken sound that fills the silence he created. You can taste the copper tang of blood on your tongue where your teeth cut your lip. Your heart doesn't just feel torn; it feels like it’s been clawed out of your chest and stomped on the cold linoleum floor.

He recoils from the sound, from the sight of you laughing while bleeding. For a moment, a flicker of confusion crosses his features, but he shoves it away. He chooses her. He always chooses her.

He gently wraps an arm around Amelia, murmuring soft comforts as he leads her toward the private medical room, leaving you there.

You finally let your legs give out, sliding down the wall until you’re a heap on the floor. The hallway is silent now. Empty. Just the distant hum of hospital machinery and the chilling echo of your own broken laughter.

The next day, a notification pings on his phone. A link from the hospital’s security division, sent as a standard follow-up to the “incident.”

Caleb watches it, his jaw tight. He expects to see your hand raised, your anger. He expects to see proof that he was right.

Instead, he sees Amelia. He watches her look both ways down the empty corridor. He watches her fill a cup with water and splash it on her own face. He watches, in sickening slow motion, as she takes a deep breath and slams her own head, hard, against the wall. Then, and only then, does she begin to cry.

The phone nearly slips from his numb fingers. The sound of his own breathing is loud in his ears. The slap. The sound it made. Your shocked face. That horrifying, blood-flecked laugh. It all replays in his mind, recast in a new, monstrous light. He was the monster.

“I did it because I love you so much, Caleb” Amelia sobs from the armchair across the room, seeing the look on his face. She knows he’s seen it. “I couldn’t…I can’t lose you to her. I had to.”

He doesn't even hear her. Her words are just buzzing insects. A distraction. He’s already up, already moving, a guttural sound of pure self-loathing ripping from his chest.

He doesn’t care anymore. Not about her, not about the baby, not about anything but the image of you collapsing in the hallway. He runs.

He finds you in the living room, sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing. The bruise on your cheek is a sickening bloom of purple and blue. A testament to his failure.

He doesn’t even make it all the way to you. He drops to his knees on the rug a few feet away, the sound a dull thud. His composure shatters completely. Great, heaving sobs wrack his body, his face buried in his hands.

“I was wrong, I never wanted to hurt you” he chokes out, the words mangled by his tears. He looks up, his eyes bloodshot and pleading. “God, baby, I’m so sorry…I’m so, so sorry...please…please forgive me…”