She pressed her hand to her belly.
"I was someone's wife," she said. The broken quality of the past tense. That devastating past tense of it — not 'I am' but 'I was.' The word that had happened when she wasn't looking.
He was watching her.
The level, attending quality of it — not defending, not moving, not explaining. Just watching with the eyes of someone who was letting a thing land because it had the right to land.
"Leave me alone," she said.
"Meera —"
"I HATE YOU."
The full volume of it. The room absorbed it — the hospital room with its pale walls and its curtain rail and its two beds and the smell of antiseptic and the morning light that was showing everything.
"I hate you," she said again. Lower. The repetition not for emphasis but because it was true in both registers — loud and quiet both. "I never want to see your face again. I never want to — don't come back. Don't appear. Don't snap your fingers or vanish or — just leave. Just leave me alone. Please."
