Phew! I know, I know - it's about damn time. This last (maybe) part of the saga is a doozy. It took me about 131 pages of writing. I changed the style up this time. It's broken down into chapters AND you get the final part from three different perspectives: the husband, Elizabeth, and Mettie.
I'm working on how to release this in its entirety, but for now you all can enjoy the first few chapters.
Chapter 1: Shattered Confidence - Husband
I'd never seen my wife so defeated. It wasn’t the bruises or the swollen lip, not even the slow, methodical way she pressed the cold spoon to her cheek in the half-light of evening. It was how she drifted around the house, a silent specter haunting the boundaries of her own life, as if she’d been evicted from her own skin and was now piecing together a plan for reentry.
I wanted to ask her how she felt, to probe the raw wound of her humiliation, but every time I tried she turned away—sometimes with a forced smile, sometimes with nothing at all. The silence between us was surgical and precise: everything that needed to be said was excised, leaving only the dull ache of absence. She started sleeping on the couch by the second night, swaddled in an old comforter that smelled faintly of lavender and dust, despite my repeated offers to change the bedding and make the bedroom feel less like a crime scene.
I missed her. I missed her voice most of all, the way she used to describe the minute details of her day—what the neighbor’s dog did, the strange shape of the clouds—like she was teaching me the only language she still trusted. Now when she spoke, it was functional, clear-eyed and crisp, as if anything more would risk a hemorrhage. We went days without any real contact, and when we did, it was a kind of choreography: hands passing a coffee cup, feet shuffling around each other at the sink, eyes meeting for a split second before one of us looked away.
At night, I replayed what happened with Mettie over and over in my head. I’d like to claim it was horror or worry that made me obsess, but the truth was more complicated. There was a strange, magnetic pull in remembering how Mettie—sweet, reticent, deferential Mettie—had bared her teeth and broken my wife’s spirit in the span of a single night. The memory of it made me restless, made my skin buzz. I’d watch the video on my phone until the battery blinked red, searching for some detail I’d missed, some clue that would help me make sense of it. But all I ever saw was the same thing: Elizabeth, so certain and proud, crumpling under the weight of someone else’s will.
Two weeks in, Elizabeth started leaving the house for long stretches. At first I thought she’d just gone for walks, but she’d return with shopping bags, fresh groceries, sometimes a new book or a scarf, as if she was constructing a new version of herself one artifact at a time. She never mentioned where she went, and I never asked.
I tried to keep myself busy, too—yard work, online poker, pointless errands—but the hollow had been set in me, and nothing really filled it. I started drinking more, not the enthusiastic, social kind of drinking I did with friends, but the solitary, cold kind where the taste of bourbon was more a comfort than a pleasure. On the rare occasion we crossed paths after dark, Elizabeth would hover in the doorway to the den, arms folded, lips pressed together, as if she was waiting for a sign I couldn’t give.
One night, the silence snapped and she walked into the den, took the bottle from my hand, and finished the last two inches straight from it. She flinched at the burn, but then she set the empty glass down, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and stared at me until I looked away.
“Do you want to know why she won?” she asked, her voice a rusty hinge.
I had no answer. Even if there'd been one, I didn’t trust my own voice not to betray the excitement I was embarrassed to feel. I nodded.
She sat, cross-legged on the carpet, arms loose at her knees like she was about to meditate or confess a secret. “I wanted her to show me who I was,” she said. “I thought if she pushed me far enough, I’d find something I never had before. Turns out, I was just as weak as I expected. Maybe worse.”
I didn’t argue, though I longed to. I longed to take her face in my hands and say she was strong, unbreakable, the only person who’d ever terrified me in the ways that counted. But I wasn't certain anymore what words would help or harm.
“I can’t get her out of my head,” Elizabeth said finally, in a bare whisper. “I see her laughing at me. Smiling like I'm a child for even trying. And it’s not the pain that bothers me. It’s that she got to use me. It's that she got you. I liked being...your only one, always.”
The confession sent a pulse through me so sharp I nearly blurted out that I’d felt the same—a sick thrill at watching her bested, the seed of a longing I hadn’t recognized until now. Instead, I said, “So what do you want?”
She tilted her face, a shadow passing over her left eye. “I want to know that she'll be out of our lives forever,” she said.
The next morning, she was gone before sunrise. The days ticked by, and I started to think she’d never talk about it again, that this was another one of her ghosts flitting through our house. Then, a week later, it was as if nothing had happened. She started making dinner, cleaning the floors, talking again, even laughing when I burned the bacon. She smoothed on her foundation and brushed her lips with berry gloss, reclaiming the small rituals that made her who she was, or at least the version of her she wanted me to see.
It was a relief. I could almost pretend the whole episode with Mettie had been my own fever dream, fodder for late-night self-flagellation and nothing more. I deleted the video from my phone, but I knew the muscle memory of it would never leave me.
Three months later, Elizabeth told me she'd be visiting her parents and spending a few nights there. I didn't think anything of it, and beamed at the opportunity to have some alone time at home. However, something in her tone, something in the way she walked told a different story than she was letting on.
Chapter 2: Seeds of Vengeance - Husband
It didn’t occur to me until hours later, lying in the blue-mottled darkness of our bedroom, that Elizabeth was lying to me. When she called from the road, said she’d left her phone charger behind and asked if I’d pick up the dry cleaning on Saturday, her voice was too bright, too even. The sounds behind her—no sports-radio drone, no tiny NPR—were nothing but wind.
I played it off at first, even told myself it was normal for her to want a break, given everything that had happened. Still, I paced the house for the next two hours, aimless, as if I could catch her shadow moving through the walls if I only turned a tight enough corner. At ten, I poured bourbon into a coffee mug and went to the den and watched reruns, volume low, eyes flicking from the screen to the empty armchair across from me. It was only after I’d drained the mug that I realized her toothbrush was gone from the bathroom, and that our liquor shelf had one fewer bottle of Smirnoff. That detail—the vodka, not the toothbrush—lodged itself into my chest.
Elizabeth never drank vodka.
I sat in the dark, and the thought grew like a tumor: maybe she wasn’t at her parents’ at all. Maybe she meant every word she said the night in the den, and tonight she was making good on it.
For the next twenty-four hours, I lived in a kind of limbo, hyper-aware of every minute that passed. I texted her, played dumb. She replied with perfectly normal, perfectly bland updates: Dad’s lasagna is undercooked (again), went for a walk with Mom, can you Venmo my brother $20 for gas? I would have bought the charade, if not for the way she signed off: Love you, see you soon.
Too normal. That’s what caught my eye.
By Sunday morning, I convinced myself that if I called her parents, I’d catch her in the lie—put an end to this nonsense and force her to come home. But when Elizabeth answered the family landline, her voice was somewhere between offense and delight. “We’re in the middle of Monopoly,” she said. “Don’t tempt me to come home early, I’m on a winning streak.”
Her father took the phone a moment later, boomed some platitude about women being more ruthless with real estate, and, when prompted, insisted Elizabeth had been upstairs only minutes before. Case closed. For a time, I believed it.
But when I hung up, I sat staring at the phone, thumb tracing the plastic edge, and found myself alive with a new, awful possibility: if Elizabeth was clever enough to engineer a cover story, it meant she was still herself—more herself than ever. She was planning something, and whatever it was, it was the opposite of surrender. For the first time in months, I felt the live wire of hope—but also the static of panic, because I had no idea what she was capable of.
On Monday, she returned home with a flourish, a duffel bag over one shoulder and a Tupperware of cookies in the other. Her cheeks were pink with road wind, and her hair was a little wild, electrified by static or anticipation.
“Monopoly massacre,” she announced, dropping the duffel next to the coat rack and peeling off her jacket. “Your wife is a property mogul. Remind me one day to teach you the art.”
It was so perfectly staged I wanted to clap. She even tossed a stray hotel token in the air and caught it, as if she’d pocketed it as a trophy.
I stood at the edge of the kitchen, mug in hand, caught between suspicion and awe. “Didn’t think board games got your blood going,” I said.
She shrugged, ducking her face behind a curtain of hair. “Things change.”
I followed her down the hall, taking in the way her posture had shifted—her shoulders notched back a little higher, her step lighter, almost predatory. It was nothing overt, but the change was there, and I was suddenly very aware she’d orchestrated this entire tableau for my benefit.
She initiated sex for the first time since the fight. Her mouth tasted faintly of cinnamon and salt, and she was hungrier than I’d ever known her to be—insatiable, almost, biting my shoulder as she pulled me tighter, as if she could absorb me whole if she just tried hard enough. I thought, with a surge both exhilarating and terrifying, that she was trying to overwrite something—erase the old Elizabeth and graft this hard, new self over it.
And for the first time, I wondered if I was the target of her plan, or merely a bystander.
She climbed on top of me, hair falling in a tangled curtain, her hands pinning my wrists with real force. She rode me with such sharp, driven fury that it rattled the headboard. I reached for her breast, remembering all the times she'd gasped with pleasure when I squeezed, but this time she winced—a flicker of pain too raw to hide. She tried to mask it, biting her lip, but I saw the tremor in her arms as she steadied herself.
I stopped moving. I let her finish, feeling her shudder around me, but when she slumped forward, catching her breath on my chest, I whispered, "What happened? Did I hurt you?"
She shook her head, hair tickling my chin. "It’s nothing," she said, but the lie was so practiced, so brittle, it made my teeth ache.
"Your left side," I said. "You kept shifting off it. Did you… did something happen at your parents’?"
She looked at me with a kind of patient resignation, as if she’d been expecting this moment. "It’s fine. Just sore."
I reached up and traced the faint shadow of a bruise that bloomed just at the edge of her cleavage. She flinched, but didn’t pull away.
"You’re a terrible liar," I said, trying to make it a joke.
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. "You never minded before."
We lay in silence for a few minutes, her breath cooling on my shoulder. I could feel her brain whirring, see her eyes flickering in the blue glow of the street lamp outside. I wanted her to trust me, to let me in—I needed to know if she was okay, if Mettie was still in her head, or worse, if she was in danger.
But Elizabeth just pressed her face into my neck and murmured, "Don’t worry about it. I can handle myself. I always do."
The next morning, she was up early, dressed and showered, already shaping herself for the day. I watched her from the kitchen, the way she moved with deliberate precision, as if the domestic act of folding laundry or packing her work bag was an armor she could strap on.
After she left, I found myself scouring the house for clues. It was childish, maybe, but I checked her browser history, the trash, the laundry basket, even her car. I found nothing but a dried blood spot on a tissue in the bathroom wastebasket, and the bruising, now yellowing, that trailed from her breastbone to her ribs.
That night, I confronted her. I hated myself for the way I did it, not with empathy but with accusation.
"You didn’t go to your parents'," I said flatly. "Where did you really go?"
She blinked, surprised for a split second, then recovered. "What are you talking about?"
She held my gaze, lashes flickering, and for a moment I almost bought the show. Then I said, “I’ll call your parents. Ask who actually won Monopoly.”
The smallest tremor, then a sigh. “Jesus, you can drop it.”
I didn’t. I stood there and waited, arms folded, the air between us thick with breath and accusation.
She stared at the stove, then at her own hands—knuckles white from clutching the countertop. “Fine,” she said. “I went to see Mettie.”
The name dropped into the kitchen like a glass falling from a table—irretrievable. My tongue went dry. “You what?”
“It was an impulse,” Elizabeth said. “I just… I needed to know something. For myself. I didn’t want you to stop me or—” She trailed off, as if the rest could be inferred, and maybe it could.
I tried to picture them together, the geometry of their bodies in the same room, and the image made my chest tighten in a way I didn’t care to examine. “So what did you do?”
Elizabeth licked her lips. “We talked.”
“That’s it?”
She turned then, leaning her hips against the counter, and for a second her eyes were glassy, almost apologetic. “I wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine. I wanted to see if I could face her down. Prove it wasn’t just luck, what happened before.”
“And did you?” My voice was sharp, but she didn’t flinch.
“Yes and no,” she said. I watched her hands, the way she kneaded the fabric of her shirt at the hem.
There was a flush on her neck now, running up into her jawline. I wondered if it was shame, or pride, or both, and felt a cold pulse of jealousy cut through me, raw and sudden and electric.
“What did she do to you?”
Elizabeth smiled, a crooked, almost bitter thing. “She saw me win,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. I could still see the shadow of a bruise above her breast, and the memory of her wincing under my hands was a clock ticking somewhere between us.
I walked to her, close enough to smell the citrus glint of her shampoo. “I want you to tell me what happened. All of it.”
She eyed me, wary. “Why?”
“Because you’re lying,” I said. “And because I need to know how much of you is still here.”
A long pause, then, “If you want the details, sit down.”
We took our places at the kitchen table, a standoff masquerading as domestic routine. She began slowly, at first only giving shape to logistics: how she’d driven to Mettie’s, how she thought they'd meet in her driveway, both pretending surprise. Her heart was racing the entire drive there.
But the words quickened, darkened, gained flesh.
Chapter 3: The Seduction of Greg - Elizabeth
When I knocked on Mettie’s door, I was trembling so hard I could barely hold the casserole. The glass pan was wrapped in a threadbare kitchen towel—one of those sassy ones with a cross-stitched martini glass and the phrase “Mommy’s Sippy Cup”—and I twisted it around my fingers, imagining the long, slow unravel of every thread.
Greg answered after only half a minute, sweat shining on his temples, in a pale green t-shirt that looked more like a hospital smock than lounge wear. He was thinner than I remembered, hollow around the eyes. His gaze flicked over me with a kind of half-formed recognition, like there was a story about me he couldn’t quite recall. For a second I was sure he’d slam the door.
“Elizabeth,” he said, blinking. “Wow. Sorry, I just—it’s been a while.”
I smiled, soft and faintly apologetic—the smile I’d spent years perfecting, the one that telegraphed vulnerability, compliance, harmlessness. “Yeah, it has. Uh, is Mettie…?”
“She’s supposed to be back soon,” he said. “She ran out for… something.” He trailed off. “You can wait, if you want. Can I get you a—” He caught himself, glanced at the casserole like it was a bomb. “Drink? Water, tea?”
“Water’s fine, thanks.” My voice was papery, barely audible. He led me through the tiny foyer crammed with fleece coats and forgotten backpacks and into the same living room I’d visited exactly once, two Easters ago, for a brunch that ended in a vague, suffocating panic attack I’d never explained to anyone.
The memory of it pressed up behind my eyes now, making the room seem smaller, the ceiling lower, as if the air itself was rationed. I set the casserole on the table, hoping he’d ask about it, maybe even joke, but Greg just disappeared into the kitchen, where the clatter of ice cubes sounded precisely, almost performatively, normal.
I used the moment to scan the room. There was a stack of mail on the coffee table, half a child’s drawing tacked to the wall next to a picture of Mettie’s parents at their wedding, both beaming under a violently pink neon sign: “Happily Ever After.” An ugly, brittle kind of cheer.
When Greg returned, he handed me a sweating glass, no lemon slice, no coaster, just water so cold it made my teeth ache. I wrapped my hands around it, the chill sobering.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, seating himself on the edge of a terry cloth armchair, the kind that frayed at the elbows. I wondered if Mettie ever sat there, legs folded, hands clasped, cloaked in the same nervous energy that now radiated from Greg.
I forced myself to nod. “I just… I should’ve called. I needed to see Mettie. We haven’t talked since.” The sentence trailed off, the rest implied.
Greg nodded, as if he’d prepared for exactly this, or maybe anything. “She’s been… not herself lately,” lately,” he finished. “I mean, you know how she gets. But it’s…worse. Maybe she’s just tired.”
There was a question there, an echo of something unspoken, and I let it swim in the space between us. I stared at the water, tracing a bead as it slid down the glass and pooled on my leg.
“She hurt me,” I said. The words fell out in a whisper, so soft I nearly missed my own admission.
(To be continued...)
