Nine years after Jesse Marlow’s mother had me raped and destroyed my family, I limp into the clinic to abort the rapist’s baby — and the half-blood Alpha-heir who let it all happen walks in wearing a doctor’s coat. I freeze for half a second. Then I keep walking. My left sleeve is empty. It’s been empty for nine years. I pin it up every morning like other women pin up their hair. Jesse looks up from the chart. His face does something — a flinch, a crack, gone before I can name it. “Wendy.” I don’t answer. I drop my appointment slip on his desk. “I’m here for an abortion. Today, please.” He doesn’t pick up the slip. He just stares at it like the paper might bite him. “Your body’s not strong,” he says quietly. “An abortion will hurt you. Are you sure?” His voice is the same. Soft. Careful. The same voice that told me I was a slut in front of our whole class. The same voice that walked away while his mother burned my life down. I look at him. Really look. He’s tall now. The half-blood thing they used to whisper about — it shows. His shoulders are too wide for the coat. His eyes are too gold for a human’s. So Crimson Fang Pack didn’t kill him after all. They just polished him up. “Yes,” I say. “I’m sure. The sooner the better.” He picks up the slip. His hand is shaking. He’s trying to hide it and failing. “Why are you doing this?” he asks. “Your husband — he’s not good to you?” My husband. I almost laugh. He thinks I have a husband. He thinks some man somewhere wakes up next to me and calls me his. I don’t correct him. He’s nobody. After today he goes back to being nobody. “Just book the surgery, Dr. Marlow.” He flinches at his own name in my mouth. He examines me in silence. Cold stethoscope. Cold hands. Hands that used to be warm when I was seventeen and stupid and thought he hung the moon. “Today,” he finally says. “We’ll do it today.” They wheel me into prep. A needle slides into my vein. The room starts swimming. A nurse pokes her head in and whispers something to Jesse. He doesn’t even hesitate. He drops everything and walks out. Through the fog I hear the nurses talking like I can’t hear them. “Dr. Marlow’s so sweet to his girlfriend. She’s got a little cold and he runs.” “Yeah. Not like this one. Comes in alone for an abortion. No man. You can tell what kind she is.” My eyelids twitch. I can’t open them. I want to tell them. I want to say it. I’m not a slut. I used to be Jesse Marlow’s whole world. —
Three hours before I limped into that clinic, I was scrolling Facebook on a break at work. A post was going viral. Already thousands of shares. I scrolled because I was bored. I scrolled because my feet hurt and I had twenty minutes before the lunch rush. Then I saw it. “My son dated a normal little girl back in high school. I didn’t stop them. I just used a few small tricks and ruined the girl. My son watched his own girlfriend rot in front of him. He got disgusted. He broke up with her. Now he’s safe at home, doing big things. This is what every great mother does for her son.” Marlene. After nine years, she’s still bragging. The comments were a war zone. Thousands of strangers calling her a monster. Thousands more cheering her on. *Smart mom. Saved her son from a gold digger.* I read it twice. I waited for something to happen in my chest. Nothing happened. I turned off my phone. I went back to wiping tables. It used to take everything in me not to scream when I thought about her. Now I can read a public confession of what she did to me and feel — nothing. Just tired. That’s what nine years of pills and broken sleep does. It hollows you out. It takes the rage and the love and the fear and grinds them into the same gray dust. My boss looked at me funny. “Wendy. You okay?” “Fine.” “You still going to the clinic after shift?” “Yeah.” She nodded. She didn’t ask whose baby. She knew better than to ask. I finished my shift. I caught the bus to the clinic across town. The smaller one. The one nobody I know goes to. The one I used to come to all the time as a kid. I limped up the steps. I signed in. I sat down with the slip in my hand. A nurse called my name. I followed her down the hall to the exam room. I pushed the door open. The doctor had his back to me. White coat. Tall. Shoulders too wide. He turned around. And nine years of gray dust caught fire all at once. Jesse Marlow. Back in the same little human clinic he used to work at, before his father’s pack came in their black SUVs and took him away. He’d come back. Of course he had. The universe had one more joke to play on me. —
I was sixteen the first time I saw him. He was sitting on the curb outside the empty house next to ours. Skinny. Pale. A backpack with one broken strap. A bruise on his jaw that nobody had asked about. My mom watched him from the kitchen window for a week. Then she put extra food in my lunch tin and shoved it into my hands. “Take this to the boy next door, Wendy. Nobody’s feeding him.” That’s how it started. His name was Jesse. He was seventeen. He told me his father had “sent him out here for the summer.” He didn’t say why. The neighbors said why. “He’s the bastard. The Alpha’s bastard from over in Crimson Fang. The pack didn’t want him so they dumped him on the human side with his mother.” I didn’t know what an Alpha was. I didn’t care. He had a bruise on his jaw and my mom had made him dumplings. I brought him food every day for a month. By the end of that month he smiled when he saw me coming. Kids at school whispered. “His mom’s a mistress. He’s half-blood wolf. He’s dirty. Don’t sit next to him, Wendy.” I turned around in my seat. I said it loud enough for the whole row to hear. “Don’t talk about him like that. Jesse’s the best person I know.” I made it up a little. I had to. Somebody had to make it up for him. A girl elbowed me. I looked up. Jesse was standing in the doorway. His eyes were red. He’d heard every word. I got embarrassed and bolted. That night he caught up to me outside the school gate. He didn’t say anything for a whole block. Then his fingers found mine. “Wendy. Thank you. You’re the best person I know too.” I didn’t pull my hand away. We walked home like that. His palm hot against mine. My face hot against the cold air. My heart doing something it had never done before. We were a couple by Halloween. He told me he’d love me forever. He told me we’d go to the same college. Buy a tiny house. Get two cats. One orange, one black. I believed him. I was sixteen and his hand was warm and nobody had ever looked at me the way he looked at me, like I was the only safe thing in the world. On my eighteenth birthday I waited for him on the porch with a cake. He was late. When he finally came home, he wasn’t alone. A woman stepped out of the car behind him. Pretty. Soft voice. Smiling at me like she’d known me for years. “You must be Wendy. I’m Jesse’s mom.” —
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