Furious by Jeffrey Higgins (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📕

away so he would not see my tears. I pulled my shoulders back and straightened, hoping I would not topple over.

“What do you think?” I asked. My voice sounded foreign, like a soundtrack dubbed by an actor.

“I have something to show you.”

“Not now.”

“Dagny, this isn’t helping.”

“I said, not now.”

He touched my hand, and I pulled it away.

I knelt and ran my fingertips over the crib bumpers, designed to keep Emma from banging her head against the wood. I had chosen the tea rose color for its calming effect. Had they contributed to her death? Brad and I were both surgeons, but we had not seen it coming, could not save her. I wanted to climb into the crib and pull the blanket over my head until the world disappeared. Until I disappeared.

“Did I lay Emma on her back?” I asked, still not making eye contact.

“We’ve been through this.”

“Was the baby monitor turned up?”

“You know it was.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Dagny, please.”

“Did you?”

Brad glared at me. “You have to stop.”

Bunny rabbits smirked at me from a mural painted on the wall. I had been overconfident, unprepared. What did life mean if an innocent child could die for no reason? My life became a pause, a question mark, a purgatory waiting for an explanation.

“I could call the medical examiner’s office or Detective Fuller again,” I said.

“You’ve called them at least once a week for months.”

“They’ve stopped returning my calls.”

“Their investigation is over. Sometimes children die and we never know the reason.”

 “I still need answers.”

I had always been an optimistic person, able to see the positive side of things, instinctively searching for ways to be happy. Not now. I still had that person inside me, but she was underwater, struggling to reach the surface, thrashing her arms and legs as her air ran out, trying to reach the light. All I could do was watch her, like a disinterested passerby on the beach, not knowing if I wanted her to make it or not.

Groaning emanated from somewhere, deep and guttural, and it took a moment to realize the sound came from me—as if my soul had taken control of my body and cried out for this nightmare to end. Life had broken on an elemental level, beyond repair. My baby was gone forever.

“Come on,” Brad said.

He took my hand and led me out of the nursery.

I did not resist.

He turned to me. “There’s something I need to talk to you about. Wait for me in the sitting room.”

“Talk about what?”

“I have to get something from my office. Wait for me.” An order, not a request.

I walked downstairs and stood in front of our bay windows, not out of curiosity or because Brad had asked me, but because I could not think of anything else to do.

A minute later, Brad hurried into the room with an envelope in his hand. He smiled. Not really a smile, but more of a failed attempt at one. His lips pressed together, and his cheeks rose, but the corners of his mouth turned down—both a smile and a frown—his frustration molded into a mask. His expression told me he had reached the boundary of his patience. He wanted my grieving to stop, needed my pain to end, craved his life back. He had found a way to move on, the ability to breathe again, and I had not.

“Hey, Dagny. How are . . . uh, I think you will like this.”

I glared at him. Emma had only been gone for six months, twice as long as she had lived. I resented his resiliency, which was not fair to him, but I did not care. Life was unfair. Emma’s death was unfair. The end of my happiness was unfair.

“Have a seat,” Brad said, his voice gentle, solemn, like the funeral director who had helped me pick out the casket. “I think I know how to help you . . . to help us. I have an idea to break you out of this—”

“Break out of this? What makes you think there’s a way out?”

“Come and sit down.”

I followed him to the couch in the center of the room. It was a cavernous space, in a massive house, on an expansive estate. Brad had bought this mansion with his family’s money and surprised me the week before we married, four months before Emma’s birth. The beauty and opulence of the house matched the other homes in Newton, Massachusetts, but it was not Boston, not the city where I had spent my entire life. Not my home. It had all happened too fast—the dating, the unexpected pregnancy, the house, the marriage. The death.

I sat on the couch and peered out at the autumn tableau. The leaves had turned crimson, vermillion, arsenic-yellow. They were dying too.

“What is it?” My voice sounded distant, cold.

“It’s been six months, and you’re almost finished with your surgical fellowship,” Brad said. “You need to . . . we need to dig our way out of this and live again. We need to—”

“How long am I allowed to be sad, Brad?”

“I’m not saying you can’t grieve, but you have to move on. This has been hard for me too.”

“Has it? You seem to have recovered quickly.” What a mean thing to say. Who was this person who had taken over my body after my soul departed?

“It’s been awful, unthinkable, but I pushed through the pain. Damn it, she was my daughter too. I’m trying to help you.”

“Sometimes I think about taking pills, making it all stop,” I said.

He slammed his hand on the back of the couch. “Fuck this. You don’t think I’ve felt like dying too?”

I glared at him, silent. There it was. The anger always bubbling just below the surface. It had broken through and filled the room, like gas from a tar pit—foul, ugly, toxic.

“I . . . I didn’t mean to yell,” Brad said. “This has been unbearable. We have to do something.”

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

I