The water ran cold from the tap, but I didn't adjust it. I let it run over my fingers, watching the way it pooled in the chipped porcelain basin, the way the mirror above it had fogged at the edges from the heat of my skin. The room was too small for everything I was carrying. The cracked tub behind me, the cheap soap on the ledge, the towel I hadn't reached for yet—all of it pressed in close, like the walls had exhaled and forgotten to inhale again.

I looked at myself. The woman in the spotted mirror had wild eyes and tangled honey-brown hair, strands stuck to her temples with sweat that had long since cooled. Her lips were still swollen. Her pupils were still blown wide, black eating the hazel. She looked like someone who had been claimed, and I didn't recognize her.

I pressed my hand to my belly again. Still slightly swollen. Still carrying the ghost of his fullness, the deep ache where he had lodged inside me, where he had been stuck for two hours while his cum pumped into my womb until I could feel it rising, hot and thick, filling me past what I thought I could hold. Somewhere in there, a child was taking root. Damon's child. I could feel it the way you feel a storm coming—in the pressure, in the electricity, in the way the air itself had changed.

And I couldn't keep lying.

But I didn't know how to tell the truth either.

The water ran. I watched it fill the basin, watched my knuckles go white where I gripped the porcelain edge. The chipped spot under my left hand bit into my palm, a small sharpness that kept me anchored to this room, this moment, this body that was no longer entirely mine.

A fresh trickle of warmth slid down the inside of my bare thigh.

I sucked in a breath and pressed my thighs together, but it was too late. The wetness had already traced a line down my skin, finding the path of least resistance, and I felt it reach the crease behind my knee before I could do anything to stop it. Damon's cum. Hours later. Still leaking from me, still marking me, still proving what I had done every time I moved.

My underwear was gone. I had discarded them in the truck, or maybe they had torn, or maybe I had simply left them there like a receipt I didn't want to carry home. Either way, I was bare under the skirt I'd thrown on in the dark, and every step I took let more of him escape me, let more of the evidence paint my skin.

The mirror fogged a little more from my breath. I watched myself exhale, watched my chest rise and fall beneath the thin fabric of my shirt. My breasts ached, heavy and full, the milk letting down at the thought of Mira even though she was in her crib down the hall. I could feel the dampness spreading at the tips of my shirt, the hyper-lactation that had plagued me since her birth making itself known at the worst possible moments. I pressed my forearm across my chest, but it didn't help.

Everything about my body was betraying me tonight.

I reached for the towel. My hand was shaking. I saw it in the mirror—the tremor running through my fingers like a current, like the aftershock of what Damon had done to me, what I had let him do, what I had begged him to do. I remembered the way I had cried out, the way I had told him to go slow and then begged for more, the way my body had torn around him and bled and still pulled him deeper. I remembered the look on his face when he realized he was stuck, that beautiful, terrifying moment when his eyes went wide and his hands gripped my hips and he couldn't pull out no matter how hard he tried.

And I remembered how I had come anyway. How I had clenched around him, milking him, drawing his cum deeper into my womb while he groaned my name like a prayer.

I closed my eyes. The water ran. The towel hung in my grip, rough cotton against my palm.

"Elena."

My whole body locked.

The voice came from the doorway, low and quiet, and I knew it before I opened my eyes. I knew the shape of it, the weight of it, the way it had softened over the years until it was more habit than feeling. I knew the man it belonged to, the husband I had betrayed, the father of my children, the one who had gone to get a towel and come back to find me standing here with another man's cum running down my leg.

I opened my eyes.

Luke was in the mirror.

He stood in the doorway, perfectly still, his slim frame filling less of the frame than Damon's would have, his neatly combed brown hair already starting to fall forward over his forehead. His glasses had slipped down his nose, the way they always did, and he hadn't pushed them up. His hazel eyes—the same hazel as mine, the thing people had always said made us look like we belonged together—were fixed on me with an intensity I hadn't seen in years.

Fixed on the wet streak on my leg.

I watched his face cycle through confusion first. His brow furrowed, his head tilting slightly, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Then denial, the corners of his mouth twitching like he was about to laugh, like this was some kind of joke, like I had spilled water on myself and he was about to tease me for it. And then the beginning of something else. Something terrible. Something that made the air in the bathroom go cold despite the steam.

"Elena," he said again, and his voice was no longer soft. It was sharp now, sharp in a way I had never heard from him, sharp enough to cut. "What is that?"

I couldn't find a lie that fit.

I stood there, my hand gripping the towel, the water still running, the cum still wet on my leg, and I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I had lied to him so many times tonight. I had lied on the phone, telling him I loved him. I had lied when he asked if I was okay, telling him I was fine. I had lied when he saw the blood on my leg, telling him I fell. And now, standing in the bathroom with the evidence of my betrayal painting my skin, I had nothing left.

The lies had all been used up.

I pressed my thighs together again, the motion reflexive, useless. The damage was done. He had seen it. The clear, thick wetness that was not water, that was not sweat, that was not anything that belonged in a bathroom where a wife was supposed to be cleaning up after a fall. It was proof. It was the truth I couldn't speak.

Luke took a step forward. Then another. His feet carried him into the bathroom, into the steam and the cheap soap smell, until he was close enough that I could see the way his hands were trembling at his sides. His soft hands, unused to labor. His accountant hands that had never torn me, never stretched me, never made me bleed the way Damon's had.

"Elena, look at me."

I couldn't. I stared at the mirror, at his reflection, at the way his jaw was tightening, at the way his eyes were moving between my face and my leg, trying to find the answer, trying to find the lie that would make this make sense.

"Is that—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Is that blood?"

He wanted it to be blood. I could hear it in his voice, the desperate hope that this was another wound, another injury from the fall I had told him about, another thing he could clean up and bandage and pretend hadn't happened. He wanted it to be blood because blood was something he could understand. Blood was something that happened to me, something that had always happened to me, something that had marked our marriage from the very first night.

But it wasn't blood.

It was clearer than blood. Thicker. It didn't have the iron smell that had filled this bathroom so many times before. It was the evidence of a man who had come inside me so deeply that I was still leaking him hours later, still carrying him in my body, still marked by him in a way Luke had never marked me.

"I need to clean up," I said. My voice came out hollow, like it belonged to someone else. "I need to—"

I turned on the tap. The water was already running, had been running this whole time, but I twisted the handle anyway, twisting it until the stream was a roar, until it filled the small room with sound, until it drowned out the sound of our marriage cracking.

Luke's hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

The touch was electric in the worst way. I flinched, my whole body recoiling, and I saw the hurt flash across his face before he could hide it. He had felt me flinch. He had felt my body pull away from him like he was a stranger, like his touch burned me, and I saw him file that away, saw him add it to the growing pile of evidence that something was very, very wrong.

"Don't," he said. His voice was rough now, rough in a way I had never heard from him. "Don't turn away from me. Not again."

"Luke—"

"What is that on your leg?" His grip tightened on my wrist, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to hold me in place. "I saw it. I'm not blind. I've been standing here watching you for the last minute, and I saw it slide down your leg, and it wasn't blood, Elena. I know what blood looks like. I've seen enough of yours."

My throat closed. I couldn't breathe. The water roared in the basin, splashing against the porcelain, soaking the front of my skirt, but I couldn't move to turn it off. I was frozen, trapped between his grip and the mirror, between the lie I wanted to tell and the truth I couldn't speak.

"Tell me," he said. His voice cracked on the last word. "Tell me what that is, and I'll believe you. I'll believe anything you say. I just need you to say it."

I looked at him. Really looked at him, for the first time in what felt like years. I saw the man I had married, the man who had held my hand through two labors, who had wiped my forehead when I was sweating, who had cried when Mira was born. I saw the man who had never been able to fit inside me without hurting me, who had made love to me with a gentleness that always felt like apology, who had accepted the bleeding and the pain as just another part of being married to me.

And I saw the man standing in front of me now, his eyes desperate, his hand gripping my wrist, his whole world hanging on the answer to one question.

I couldn't give it to him.

I couldn't say the words that would break him.

I couldn't tell him that another man had torn through me, that another man had lodged himself inside my womb, that another man's child was already growing where his children had grown.

So I did the only thing I could do.

I pulled my wrist free from his grip, and I turned back to the mirror, and I watched my own reflection as I said, "I fell."

The lie hung in the air between us, thin and transparent as glass. I could see it in his face, the way he wanted to believe it, the way he was reaching for it like a drowning man reaching for a rope. But we both knew. We both knew it wasn't true.

The water ran. The cum dried on my leg. And somewhere deep inside me, Damon's child took root.