Chapter 1 - The Anatomy of a Abandonment
The dashboard clock on Garrett Whitmore’s late-model silver sedan glowed with a pale, cold green: 1:17 a.m.
Inside the cabin, the air was thick with the smell of wet wool, old upholstery leather, and the heavy, sweet scent of rub-on menthol chest ointment that had failed to clear Eleanor’s lungs three days ago. Outside, Route 70—a long, unlit stretch of asphalt cutting through the dense pine forests forty miles west of Nashville—had turned into an impenetrable channel of dark water, falling trees, and flashing silver spray every time the storm split the sky open with lightning.
Eleanor sat curled against the passenger door, wedged into the gap between the leather seat and the door panel. She was wearing Garrett’s discarded oversized grey sweatshirt—the cotton threadbare at the cuffs and stained with faded coffee drips—and a white cotton nightgown that was soaked through at the hem from the puddle on the floor mat.
Her right hand was clutched against her lower right abdomen, where a sharp, white-hot knife of pain had been twisting every forty seconds since midnight. Her fever had reached 103.4 degrees two hours earlier, blurring the green numbers on the dash into glowing green smudges that seemed to float in the dark.
"Garrett," she gasped, her voice sounding like dry paper rubbing across stone. "Please... you passed the turn for St. Thomas... ten miles back. Garrett, please..."
Garrett’s hands stayed locked at ten and two on the leather-wrapped steering wheel. His knuckles were chalk-white under the intermittent flash of oncoming high beams. He was thirty-six years old, wore a bespoke wedding ring made of brushed titanium, and worked as a senior compliance officer for a medical supply distributor in downtown Nashville. His jaw was clenched so tight that the muscles beneath his ear twitched with every heavy beat of his heart.
He did not look at her.
"Garrett..." Eleanor reached out a hand. Her fingers were thin, yellowed at the nail beds from six months of poor liver function, and shaking with a severe, cold tremor. "It’s... it’s ruptured. I can feel it. Please."
"Shut up, Eleanor," he said.
His voice was not loud. It was low, flat, and hollowed out by three years of resentment that had slowly hardened from a quiet disappointment into a sharp, lethal hatred.
"Just shut your mouth," he repeated, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the rain-blurred white line dividing the asphalt. "I’ve listened to you whine for thirty-six months. I’ve listened to you moan about your joints. I’ve listened to you moan about your stomach. I’ve listened to you cry in the bathroom at three in the morning when you thought I was sleeping."
"I was sick, Garrett," she whispered, a tear cutting a hot, clean track through the dried perspiration and dust on her cheek. "I didn't... I didn't choose this..."
"You didn't choose it?" Garrett let out a short, barked laugh that carried no humor—only a bitter, venomous exhaustion. "You let yourself go. You stopped going to the gym three years ago. You stopped dressing up. You turned our house into a dispensary. Every counter in the kitchen is covered in amber prescription bottles. My whole salary... every bonus I’ve made since twenty-twenty-one... swallowed by copays, out-of-network specialists, and holistic junk your mother sent you."
"I paid... I used my savings..."
"Your savings ran out in August!" he yelled, his hands slamming against the steering wheel as the car hit a deep puddle, sending a wall of muddy water over the windshield. The wipers shrieked as they dragged across the glass. "I can't take the calls anymore, Eleanor! I can't take the collectors! I can't take my friends asking me why my wife looks like a ghost every time they come over for football! I'm thirty-six years old! My life hasn't even started, and I'm buried alive in a hospice with a woman who looks sixty!"
A spasm of visceral pain cut through Eleanor’s lower torso so violently that her spine arched off the seat. She choked, her eyes rolling back into her head as a wave of cold nausea hit her throat. She grabbed his right forearm, her thin nails digging into his wool sleeve.
"Call... call nine-one-one..." she sobbed. "Garrett... I’m dying."
Garrett looked down at her fingers on his sleeve. His expression did not show horror, panic, or grief. It showed a cold, clinical disgust—the look a man gives a stray animal that has crept onto his porch to die.
He yanked the wheel to the right.
The sedan’s tires hit the shoulder, the gravel rattling violently against the undercarriage as the car skidded six feet through flooded weeds before coming to a sudden, jarring halt beside a rusted guardrail. The headlights illuminated a thick wall of pine trunks and a muddy ditch overflowing with brown rainwater.
"Get out," Garrett said.
The engine idle was low, steady, and indifferent.
Eleanor blinked through her blurred vision, her brain struggling to grasp the word. "What...?"
"You said it yourself," Garrett said, unbuckling his own seatbelt with a crisp, plastic click. He turned his body toward her, his face half-shadowed in the green glow of the instrument panel. "You said you're dying. If you die in my car, there's an autopsy. There are questions. The police will ask why I waited three hours to drive you to the hospital. They'll ask why your tox screen shows eighty milligrams of Diazepam."
Eleanor’s lungs seized. "The... the white pills? You... you gave me those..."
"I gave you what you needed to stay quiet so I could sleep," Garrett whispered, his eyes narrowing into dark slits. "And now I'm giving myself what I need."
He reached across the console, popped her seatbelt buckle, and threw her passenger door open.
The storm roared into the luxury sedan instantly. Cold rain, whipped by thirty-mile-per-hour gusts, tore through the cabin, instantly soaking Eleanor’s face, hair, and nightgown. The smell of rotting pine needles and wet asphalt replaced the smell of leather.
"No!" Eleanor screamed, a instinctual, terrifying scream that tore her raw throat. She grabbed the edge of the leather headrest with both hands. "Garrett, no! Please! I have nowhere to go! It's four miles to the nearest light! Garrett!"
Garrett didn't argue. He reached over, caught her beneath her arms with his heavy, dry hands, and uncurled her fingers from the leather by force, snapping her thumb back until she let out a sharp, bird-like cry.
He hauled her forty-pound frame out of the seat and dumped her sideways over the door sill.
Eleanor hit the gravel shoulder on her side. Her bare knees slammed into sharp limestone rocks; her left palm sank three inches into freezing, viscous mud. Pain—bright, blinding, and absolute—erupted from her abdomen as her internal organs shifted under the impact.
She pulled herself up onto her hands and knees, her long hair plastered across her face like black threads, her nightgown weighed down by fifty pounds of rainwater. She dragged herself toward the open door of the sedan, her fingers clawing at the rubber weather stripping on the door frame.
"Garrett!" she shrieked into the roar of the wind. "Look at me! Look at me, Garrett!"
Garrett stood in the narrow gap between the open door and the frame. He was wearing his heavy lined canvas coat. Rain ran down his clean-shaven cheeks, off the tip of his nose, and dripped onto the collar of his shirt. He looked down at her with a flat, empty composure that was far worse than any rage.
"You were already dying, Eleanor," he said, his voice carrying clearly over the storm. "I'm just done dying beside you."
He leaned forward, grabbed the interior handle, and slammed the passenger door shut.
The lock clicked.
Eleanor threw her body against the glass, her muddy hand leaving a dark, streaked palm print on the window. She saw his face behind the glass—smooth, focused, already reaching for the gear shift.
The transmission clunked into drive. The sedan’s heavy rear tires spun in the wet gravel, launching a spray of mud and crushed rock across Eleanor’s bare legs, and then caught the wet asphalt of Route 70.
The red LED taillights flared brightly once as the car pulled out onto the empty highway, accelerating rapidly into the wall of rain.
May you like
Eleanor lay on her side in the mud, her cheek pressed against a cold, flat limestone rock, watching those two red dots grow smaller, dimmer, and more distant until the curves of the pine forest swallowed them entirely.
The storm closed in over her. Rain hammered her back, filling her ears with a steady, rhythmic roar. The fever burned inside her like an oven, while the mud beneath her drew the remaining heat from her bones. She closed her eyes, squeezed her hand against her ruptured belly, and let the darkness take her.
