Page 188 of The Clinch
My throat feels lined with ground glass.
Ray reaches for the ropes and ducks partway in, eyes scanning me one more time. “Locker room,” he says.
“In a minute.”
He looks as if he might argue, then doesn’t. Because he knows. He knows exactly what just got said in this room. What just got put on camera. What I know now that I didn’t know ten minutes ago.
Not just that she lost a pregnancy.
That he put his hands on her while she was carrying his child and still stood here tonight calling her his wife.
Something uglier than rage moves through me. I lock it down.
Across the ring, Drake spits pink into the towel and tries to glare at me through one swelling eye.
I look back at him and feel nothing at all that he would understand.
Jessica puts her phone away. “We’re done here.”
And just like that, the room begins to empty with the cold efficiency of something finished.
Ray isthe last one to leave me alone with the silence.
I sit on the edge of the bench in the locker room with my forearms braced on my thighs and stare at the concrete floor between my feet.
My gloves are off.
Tape still wrapped around my hands.
Knuckles red.
No blood on me except the little bit that caught under one thumbnail before I washed it off at the utility sink.
It should feel different from this. Cleaner. Finished.
Instead, it feels as if somebody reached into my chest, closed a fist around the center of me, and left it there.
Pregnant.
I shut my eyes.
That word keeps landing in different places and breaking something new every time.
My jaw locks so hard pain shoots up behind my ear. There are a hundred ways I could hurt him that wouldn’t help her atall. None of them would change what already happened. None of them would put that child back in her body. None of them would erase the fact that she carried all of that alone.
I drag a hand down my face.
There’s a knock on the half open door.
Jessica leans against the frame without stepping all the way in. “We’re good here,” she says.
I look at her. She understands the question without me asking it.
“She left with Eden. They took Nate’s car.”
Something in my shoulders shifts before I can stop it.
“She’s not alone,” she adds.
