The smell of roast duck hung in the air like a heavy fog – thick, buttery, laced with sharp cinnamon sweetness. To anyone else, that aroma promised celebration, family warmth. But sitting at the head of my own dining table, it was just a cruel reminder of my helplessness.
The scent of my own starvation. I stared at my plate—bone-white china with gold trim that caught the chandelier light. Part of a set William and I bought in the French Quarter forty years ago.
We’d laughed that day, worried the porcelain wouldn’t survive the flight home. Now the plate was empty. Perfectly, mockingly clean.
Where my hand should have rested on the linen tablecloth sat a heavy plaster cast instead. It felt cold and alien, like a stone tied to my body, dragging me into ocean depths. The swelling under the rough plaster throbbed with malicious rhythm.
Every heartbeat sent dull, aching spikes through my forearm, shooting to my shoulder and settling at my neck base. Radius fracture with displacement. I knew the diagnosis before seeing the X-ray.
I’d spent thirty years as a trauma surgeon—I knew the sound of bone giving way. That dry, sickening snap like a dead branch cracking in winter storm when Tavarius shoved me into the doorframe. “Come on, y’all.
Don’t be shy.” Tavarius’s voice, loud and dripping with unearned entitlement, rolled through the room, drowning out polite silverware clinking. “The duck today is magnificent. Javisha really outdid herself.”
Tavarius sat in my husband’s seat—the high-backed mahogany chair upholstered in dark velvet.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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