Chapter 2 - The Performance of Grief
David threw the double doors open with such force that the crystal sconces chimed violently against the wainscoting. He froze on the threshold, a silver boutonnière pinned to his tailored morning coat, his smile disintegrating as his brain tried to assemble the sensory horror before him: the smell of fresh iron, the crushed pearls scattered like shattered teeth across the parquet, and my body pinned under the heavy train of my wedding gown.
"Sarah!" His voice cracked, a sound of unadulterated boyish terror.
"David! Oh God, David, don't touch her—call an ambulance!" Harper shrieked. Her emerald silk was thoroughly smeared with my arterial spray. She looked entirely like a loving sibling dragged through an abattoir while trying to save her kin. She was trembling with full-body convulsions, her fingers clutching her collarbones, chest heaving. "The lace—the heirloom corset—it just imploded! I tried to catch her! I tried to hold the steel back, but it snapped inward!"
I opened my mouth to speak. *She laced it until it failed. She knew the fatigue limits. She watched it break.*
All that came out was a wet, bubbling rasp. My intercostal nerves were non-responsive; my diaphragm was fighting against a surging hemothorax. When a spine suffers an acute mechanical transection or severe compression shock, the autonomous nervous system panics. Blood pressure plummets. Cold sweat broke across my forehead, freezing in the drafts from the terrace.
David fell to his knees beside me, his hands hovering over my pale, sweating face, terrified to move me. "Sarah, look at me. Stay with me, darling. Please. Look at my eyes."
I looked at him. I wanted to scream through my eyes, to project the memory of Harper’s smirking mouth directly into his consciousness. But he only saw a dying bride.
Harper knelt beside him, placing an ostensibly stabilizing hand on David’s shoulder while leaning over me. From that angle, David saw a grieving sister offering comfort; I saw the cold, dilated pupils of a sociopath checking her handiwork.
"She's losing color," Harper whispered, her breath brushing my ear, warm and scented with gardenias. "Her pulse is thready, David. We shouldn't move the fabric. If we cut it, we might accelerate the internal hemorrhage."
She wasn't trying to prevent hemorrhage. She was trying to keep the metal wedge embedded deep in my canal, grinding into the nerve roots with every involuntary spasm of my dying torso. Every second that passed without decompression sealed my permanent paralysis.
"Nine-one-one is on speaker," David sobbed, fumbling with his phone against the bloody floor. "They're four minutes out. Sarah, hang on. Please, baby, don't leave me."
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I stared into the ceiling’s carved plaster rosette, watching the light slowly leach out of the room. Beneath the rising gray veil of hypovolemic shock, a singular, cold realization anchored me: I was an engineer. I understood structures. Harper thought she had dismantled me like an old scaffold, but as long as my brain could still calculate, she had only initiated a failure sequence she could not control.
***
