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The sharp, cracking sound of flesh hitting flesh seemed to absorb every other noise in the trauma bay. For a split second, the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor and the low hum of the ventilation system faded into a ringing vacuum.

My head jerked violently to the left, burying my cheek into the stiff, bleach-scented hospital pillow. A sudden, hot flash of pain bloomed across my jaw, mixing with the metallic taste of blood where my teeth had caught the inside of my cheek. I blinked, my vision swimming under the harsh fluorescent lights of the ceiling.

“I don’t care what your excuse is,” Richard hissed.

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I slowly turned my face back toward him. My husband of thirty-two years stood at the edge of my hospital bed, his chest heaving under his crisp, maroon golf shirt. His face was a mottled, furious red, the veins in his neck bulging against his collar.

He didn’t cast a single glance at the heavy fiberglass cast encasing my right leg from the ankle to the mid-thigh. He didn’t look at the thick white gauze wrapped tightly around my left calf, where the emergency room doctor had just finished suturing an eight-inch gash.

“My mother has the Harrisons coming over in exactly two hours,” Richard continued, his voice dripping with venomous impatience, leaning his knuckles into the mattress. “You are going to get out of this bed, get in the car, and go home to start the roast. Now.”

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The sheer audacity of the demand hung in the air, thick and suffocating.

Nurse Davis, a seasoned ER veteran who had been in the middle of checking the circulation in my toes, froze completely. Her gloved hands hovered a few inches above my cast. She looked at Richard as if he had just crawled out of a sewer.

“Sir,” Nurse Davis said, her voice dropping into a flat, dangerous tone. She took a slow, deliberate step backward, sliding her shoulders along the wall until her hand rested inches from the blue security button. “You need to step away from the patient right this second.”

“Shut up,” Richard snapped, barely sparing her a glance. “She’s my wife. And she’s faking half of this just to embarrass my mother and ruin our Sunday.”

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Forty-five minutes earlier, the idea of Richard walking into this hospital had been my deepest, most suffocating dread.

It had been exactly forty-five minutes since the paramedics had rolled me through the swinging double doors of St. Jude’s Medical Center. My jeans had been cut open up to the thigh, soaked in my own blood. I was shaking uncontrollably, trapped in the adrenaline-fueled aftermath of a teenager in a silver Honda blowing through a red light at sixty miles an hour and broadsiding my driver’s side door.

The pain had been a blinding, white-hot sheet of agony. The crunch of metal, the smell of deployed airbags and burnt rubber, and the terrifying snap of my own tibia were burned into my memory.

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But even through the fog of morphine and shock, one sound had cut through the chaos of the emergency room.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

My cell phone, sitting on the grey plastic tray table next to my bed, had been vibrating so violently it was slowly sliding toward the edge.

Nurse Davis had noticed it while she was prepping the IV line in my left arm. She glanced at the screen, her brow furrowing. “Honey, you’ve got twenty-something missed calls from a ‘Richard.’ Should I answer it? Tell him you’re in the ER?”

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“No,” I had rasped, my throat raw from screaming in the ambulance. “Don’t touch it. Please.”

She had given me a look of deep, quiet understanding—the kind of look nurses give when they realize the injury on the bed isn’t the only trauma in a patient’s life. “Okay, sweetie. I’ll just silence it.”

But even silenced, the screen kept lighting up. Twenty-five missed calls. Thirty-two. Forty-eight. Fifty-two missed calls.

I knew exactly what was happening in his mind. He wasn’t worried. He was annoyed. I was supposed to be at the grocery store buying fresh rosemary and a chuck roast for his mother’s pretentious Sunday dinner. Eleanor, a woman who had never hidden her disdain for me, expected Sunday dinner served at four o’clock sharp. By two-thirty, when I hadn’t returned, Richard’s annoyance would have turned to rage. He didn’t care if I was bleeding out in a ditch; he only cared that I was making him look bad in front of his mother.

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