The emergency room doors burst open before the ambulance had fully stopped.
Bright lights rushed above me as paramedics pushed my stretcher through a corridor filled with hurried footsteps, ringing phones, and clipped medical commands. Every movement sent another bolt of agony through the left side of my face.
“Twenty-seven-year-old female,” one paramedic announced. “Blunt-force trauma to the orbital region. Brief loss of consciousness. Heavy bleeding at the scene. Possible facial fractures.”
“Assault?” a nurse asked.
“Witnessed assault. Police are on the way.”
The word settled over me like ice.
Assault.
Until that moment, some foolish part of me had still wanted to call it an accident. A family argument. A terrible mistake made in anger.
But my father had picked up a brick.
He had aimed it at my face.
And after I fell, my mother had laughed.
A doctor leaned over me, her expression calm but urgent.
“My name is Dr. Evelyn Hart. Sadie, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital.”
“Do you know what happened?”
My throat tightened.
“My father hit me with a brick.”
The doctor’s eyes changed—not with shock, but with a controlled kind of anger.
“All right. We’re going to take care of you.”
Wyatt appeared beside the stretcher, his shirt torn at the shoulder and his hands scratched from the rose bushes.
“I’m her fiancé.”
A nurse tried to stop him.
“You need to wait outside.”
“No.” I reached blindly for him. “Please.”
Wyatt caught my hand.
“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m not leaving.”
They cut away part of my dress to check for other injuries. A nurse cleaned blood from my neck while another placed an IV in my arm. The ceiling blurred whenever I tried to focus.
I could still see my mother’s smile.
I could still hear Melanie saying, “I told you she wouldn’t move.”
Dr. Hart examined my left eye carefully.
“Sadie, your eyelid is badly swollen. I need you not to force it open.”
“Am I blind?”
“We don’t know yet.”
The fear that entered my chest was so sharp that for a moment it hurt worse than my broken face.
Wyatt squeezed my hand.
“No matter what happens, I’m here.”
I turned my right eye toward him.
His face was pale. His jaw trembled with rage. There was blood on his cuff—my blood.
